Lecture 2 the birth and rise of a national literature (1776-1820)

As a philosophical movement called the Enlightenment swept over Europe in the 18th century, its rational logic and its ideas on human rights were eagerly adopted in the colonies. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), a printer and publisher in Philadelphia, was a model Enlightenment figure. He was an author, scientist, inventor, common-sense philosopher, and a statesman and diplomat in his later years, during the colonies’ fight for independence. Franklin’s “Autobiography”, written about his life from 1731 to 1759, displays worldly wisdom and wit, along with satire and a practical dose of advice on daily living.

By the mid-1700s, the colonies had enough printing presses to publish a great number of newspapers and political pamphlets, most of them echoing the ideology of the Enlightenment. These political writings helped arouse the colonists to wage war against the British government that ruled them. In 1776, the colonists’ position was formally stated in the Declaration of Independence, which was chiefly the work of a wealthy young Virginia landowner and lawyer, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). Although he wasn’t a writer by profession, Jefferson was a brilliant thinker, and the strong, clear, fervent language of the Declaration makes it a prose masterpiece. After the colonies won their independence from Britain in 1783, Jefferson campaigned for Constitutional provisions protecting individual rights, which were embodied in the Bill of Rights (the Constitution’s first 10 Amendments). He also served as the new country’s third president.

With independence, energies that had gone into fighting the war were channeled instead into building the new United States. That included the development of a “native” culture. Colonists had imported new plays and novels from Europe before the war; now they hoped for American writers to give them similar literature, dealing with American subjects. A new literature could not, of course, spring up overnight. What often happened was that American writers strained to copy British works. The first American plays were mostly romantic melodramas, usually set during the recent war. The first novelists generally imitated popular European novels. Many women wrote sentimental love stories modeled upon British novelist Samuel Richardson’s (1689-1761) “Pamela” and “Clarissa”. American author Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816) wrote a sprawling satire, “Modern Chivalry”, which was similar to the Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote, except that it was set on the American frontier. Charles Brockden Brown’s (1771- 1810) “Wieland” and “Ormond” were imitations of the suspenseful “Gothic” novels then being written in England.

The leading poet of the early republic was Philip Freneau (1752-1832), a personal friend of many important leaders of the American Revolution. Freneau’s early poems were glowingly patriotic, either celebrating American victories or commenting passionately upon the issues facing the new democracy. After the turn of the century, however, he wrote instead about nature, following the trend in Europe, where the “Romantic” movement was just beginning.

Freneau was perhaps the first professional writer in America, but his fame did not spread beyond his native shores. In 1819, however, a cultured young New Yorker named Washington Irving (1783-1859) published “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent”, a volume of stories that was read just as eagerly in Europe as in the United States. Irving was known in New York as part of a circle of literary men-about-town called “the Knickerbocker Wits," but his travels in Europe and his friendship with major literary figures abroad had given him a more cosmopolitan viewpoint. The Sketch Book contains such classic American stories as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” To Europeans, these tales from the New World seemed exotic, yet they were written with a European polish and humor.

Only two years after The Sketch Book, another American writer began to attract attention – James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). His books included a series of frontier novels, such as “The Last of the Mohican” and “The Deerslayer”, and several gripping sea novels. Cooper used the “exotic” settings of the new continent, but he went beyond that to create a distinctively American style of hero – an uneducated man, close to nature, who survived on his instincts, honesty and common sense.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) became recognized as the finest American poet. His most famous poem “Thanatopsis” is a meditation on the meaning of death. he was also one of the most influential newspaper editors of his time and played a leading role in public affairs for almost 50 years.

In 1828, Noah Webster published an American dictionary, defining what made the English language spoken in America different from British English. The election of frontier hero Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1829 symbolized to many the achievement of a real democracy, and political cartoons and satiric humor blossomed in newspapers. The spread of public schools through the states ensured a large reading public. Educator William Holmes McGuffey’s (1800-1873) publishing of a series of primers, which were widely used in those schools, ensured that the general population shared a common store of literary material – poems, moralistic tales and quotations from literature. After 1836, more than 120 million copies of the “McGuffey Readers” were printed, and they influenced generations of Americans.