American literature

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American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but it also includes literature produced in the United States in languages other than English.^[1]

The American Revolutionary Period (1775–1783) is notable for the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. An early novel is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, published in 1791. Writer and critic John Neal in the early- to mid-nineteenth century helped advance America toward a unique literature and culture, by criticizing predecessors such as Washington Irving for imitating their British counterparts and by influencing writers such as Edgar Allan Poe.^[2] Edgar Allan Poe took American poetry and short fiction in new directions. Ralph Waldo Emerson pioneered the influential Transcendentalism movement; Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, was influenced by this movement. The conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and authors of slave narratives, such as Frederick Douglass. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) explored the dark side of American history, as did Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Major American poets of the nineteenth century include Walt Whitman, Melville, and Emily Dickinson. Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born in the West. Henry James achieved international recognition with novels like The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

Following World War I, modernist literature rejected nineteenth-century forms and values. F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the carefree mood of the 1920s, but John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, who became famous with The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and William Faulkner, adopted experimental forms. American modernist poets included diverse figures such as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings. Depression-era writers included John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath (1939). America's involvement in World War II led to works such as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Prominent playwrights of these years include Eugene O'Neill, who won a Nobel Prize. In the mid-twentieth century, drama was dominated by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Musical theater was also prominent.

In late 20th century and early 21st century there has been increased popular and academic acceptance of literature written by immigrant, ethnic, and LGBT writers, and of writings in languages other than English.^[3] Examples of pioneers in these areas include LGBT author Michael Cunningham, Asian American authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Ocean Vuong, and African Americans authors such as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. In 2016, the folk-rock songwriter Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.