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American literature begins with the legends, myths and poetry of the American Indians, the first people to life in what is now the United States. Indians legends included stories about the origin of the world, the histories of various tribes, and tales of tribal heroes.
The first American literature was neither American nor really literature. It was not American because it was the work mainly of immigrants from England. It was not literature as we know it in the form of poetry, essays, or fiction but rather an interesting mixture of travel accounts and religious writings.
The earliest colonial travel accounts are records of the perils and frustrations that challenged the courage of America’s first settlers.
The purpose of the first writers was to attract dissatisfied inhabitants of the Old World across the ocean to the New. As a result, their travel accounts became a kind of literature to which many groups responded by making the hazardous crossing to America. The earliest settlers included Dutch, Swedes, German, French, Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese, of the immigrants who came to America in the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, however, the overwhelming majority was English.
The English immigrants who settled on American’s northern seacoast, appropriately called New England, came in order to practice their religion freely. They were either Englishman who wanted to reform the Church of England or people who wanted to have an entirely new church. These two groups combined, especially in what became Massachusetts, came to be known as “Puritans”, so named after those who wished to “purify” the Church of England.
The Puritans followed many of the ideas of the Swiss reformer John Calvin.
Through the Calvinist influence the Puritans emphasized the then common belief that human beings were basically evil and could do nothing about it; and that many of them, though not all, would surely be condemned to hell.
Over the years the Puritans built a way of life that was in harmony with their somber religion, one that stressed hard work, thriff, piety, and sobriety. These were the Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American writing including the sermons, books, and letters of such noted Puritan clergymen as John Cotton and Cotton Mather. During his life Cotton Mather wrote more than 450 works, an impressive output of religious writings that demonstrate that he was an example, as well as an advocate, of the Puritan ideal of hard work. During the last half of seventeenth century the Atlantic coast was settled both north and south. Colonies still largely English were established. Among the colonists could be found poets and essayists; but no novelists. The absence of novelist is quite understandable: the novel form had not even developed fully in England; the Puritan members of the colonies believed that fiction ought not to be read because it was, by definition, not true.
The American poets who emerged in the seventeenth century adapted the style of established European poets to subject matter confronted in a strange, new environment. Anne Bradstreet was one such poet, who was born in educated in England. She both admired and imitated several English poets. Another important colonial poet, who achieved wide popularity was Michael Wigglesworth.
Twentieth century literary scholars have discovered the manuscripts of a contemporary of Wigglesworth named Edward Taylor, who produced what is perhaps the finest seventeenth century American verse. Taylor never published any of his poetry. In fact, the first of Edward Taylor’s colonial poetry did not reach print until the third decade of the twentieth century.
As the decades passed new generations of American born writers became important. Boston, Massachusetts, was the birthplace of one such American born writer. His name was Benjamin Franklin. The practical world of Benjamin Franklin stands in sharp contrast to the fantasy world created by Washington Irving. Named after George Washington, the first president of the United States, Irving provided a young nation with humorous, fictional accounts of colonial past.
Another writer, James Fennimore Cooper, contributed two of the great stock figures of American mythology: the daring frontiersman and the bold Indian. Cooper’s exciting stories of the American frontier have won a large audience for his books in many parts of the world.
While prose was contributing to development of an American mythology, the first poetry in the United States was also being written; Philip Freneau, one of the first poets of the new nation, wrote in a style which owed something to English models. If Freneau can be considered one of America’s first great nationalist poets, William Cullen Bryant merits a claim to being one of America’s first naturalist poets.
We can’t help saying about such notable poets as Edgar Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who contributed American literature with their prose and verse.
The earliest writing in America considered of the journals and reports of European explorers and missionaries. These early authors left a rich literature describing their encounters with new lands and civilization. Beginning from these early times the American literature has been developing up to date. Such well-known writers and poets as Edgar Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway and others became the pride not only of the American literature but of the whole world literature as well. As any other literature, the American literature reflected all historical events that took place in the world. The American literature suffered different periods: romanticism, realism, modernism etc.
The period of 40s-90s is the period of late romanticism in the literature of the USA. It coincides with the creative work of Edgar Allan Poe, who is considered to be one of the pioneers of National American literature.
2.2 Characteristics of Edgar Poe’s short stories
The American poet Edgar Allan Poe, was also a master of the prose tale. A gifted, tormented man, Poe thought about proper function of literature for more than any of his predecessors, with the result that he became the first great American literary critic. He Developed a theory of poetry which was in disagreement with what most poets of the mid-nineteenth century believed. Unlike many poets, Poe was not an advocate of long poems. According to him, only a short poem could sustain the level of emotion in the reader that was generated by all good poetry. Besides Poe worked as an editor and contributor to magazines in several cities. He unsuccessfully tried to found and edit his won magazine, which would have granted him financial security and artistic control in what he considered a hostile literary marketplace.
Poe was never a good businessman but he was a good editor. His writing as a critic was especially well known. For Poe was not only a man with a fine mind who was a good writer; he had very clear opinions about the art of writing and had no fear at all about publishing those opinions. If he didn’t like a book or a poem or a story he cut it and the writer into pieces with his words.
During his lifetime, Poe made many enemies through his challenge to moralistic limits on literature, his confrontation with the New England literary establishment, and his biting critical style. Some readers too easily identified Poe with the mentally disturbed narrators of his tales, a belief reinforced by Rufus Griswold, Poe’s literary executor. Griswold wrote a malicious obituary and memoir of Poe that combined half-truth and outright falsehoods about Poe’s personal habits and conduct. Griswold portrayed Poe as envious, conceited, arrogant, and bad-tempered. Griswold’s portrait severely damaged Poe’s reputation and delayed a serious consideration of the writer’s place in American literature. But Poe’s later rediscovery by the French poets Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Paul Valery helped restore his reputation.
But was he? Poe was born in Boston in January of 1809 the son of traveling actors. His father deserted the family. After his mother died in 1811, Poe becomes a ward of John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant. The Allan family lived in Great Britain from 1815 to 1820 before returning to Richmond. In 1826, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia. There he acquired gambling debts that John Allan refused to pay. Eventually, Poe was forced to withdraw from the university.
Poe’s relationship with Allan deteriorated, and the young man enlisted in the USA army in 1827. During the same year, Poe’s first book was published. Its title was “Tamerlane and other Poems”, by “a Bostonian”. While waiting for an appointment to the US Military Academy, Poe published his second volume of poems: “All Araaf, “Tamerlane”, and “Minor poems”(1829). Both collections show the influence of the English poet Lord Byron. In 1830, Poe entered the US. Military Academy at West Point, N. Y., where he excelled in the4 study of languages. But he was expelled in 1831 for neglecting his duties.
Poe’s “Poems” (1831) contained two important poems “to Helen” and “Israfel”. He began to publish tales in the early 1830’s while living with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. Poe suffered financial difficulties, especially after being ignored in John Allan’s will. He received help from American novelist John P. Kennedy in winning an editorial post with the “southern literary messenger” in Richmond. In 1836, Poe married Virginia Clemm, his 13year old cousin. For the “Messenger”, Poe contributed reviews, original or revised poems and stories, and two installments of “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”.
Poe produced several of his finest tales in the late 1830’s, including “Ligeia”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and “William Wilson”. These and other stories were incorporated into “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” (1834). In 1841, he became an editor of “Graham’s Magazine”, to which he contributed “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”.
Poe won greater recognition with “The God Bug” (1843), a prize winning tale that appeared in Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper. The poem “ The Raven” (1845) made him famous. Two more collections “ Tales” and “ The Raven and the other Poems”, appeared in 1845. Early in 1845, Poe antagonized many people with a scathing campaign against the popular. American poet Henry Wadworth Longfellow for supposed plagiarism. At a public appearance in Boston later that year, Poe admitted to being drunk, which further alienated the public.
Poe’s later years were colored by economic hardship and ill health. Nevertheless, he published the story “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), and part of his “Marginalia”, a collection of critical notes written for various periodical during the 1840’s.
Virginia Poe died of tuberculosis in 1847, after five years of illness. Poe then sank into poor health, and his literary productivity declined. In the middle and late 1840’s, he sought to support himself as a lecturer. His lecture on “The Universe” was expanded into Eurika: A Prose Poem(1848), which explores the mysteries of the Universe.
In 1849, Poe became engaged to marry the widowed Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, his boyhood sweetheart. On his way to bring Mrs. Clemm to the wedding, Poe stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, he was found semiconscious and delirious outside a tavern used as a polling place. The cause of his death four days later was listed as “congestion of the brain”, though the precise circumstances of his death have never been fully explained.
As professor F. Cowles Strickland shard, that Edgar Poe drank too much, that he learned how to drink; the trouble is that he didn’t. Most men did not drink badly of another man just because he drank; but if the man didn’t know how to drink if he drank too much or at the wrong time of day or in the wrong place then men felt that drinking was wrong. Poe was one who didn’t know how. But he didn’t drink all the time. If that had been true he could no have written anything. There were long periods when Poe didn’t drink at all; but there were other periods when he felt he couldn’t continue to exist without drinking. Thus Poe, created trouble for himself. This is not the only example of how Poe did the wrong thing, knowing that it was the wrong thing. Apparently it was a part of his character to do so. Poe recognized this problem in himself. In his story “The Black Cat” he wrote;
“Who has not, a hundred times, found himself doing wrong, doing some evil thing for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Are not we humans at all times pushed, ever driven in some unknown way to break the lay just because we understand it to be the law?”2
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