From its origins in colonial America to its present status internationally, American literature has stressed the diversity and uniqueness of the American character and experience. The Puritans attempted to demonstrate that God had ordained their emigration and had intended that their communities stand as examples of holiness and right for the rest of the world. In Revolutionary times this idea of specialness came to include unique American types, such as the Yankee, and a belief that the country was destined to produce a new literature. As it matured, American literature followed the major movements of Western literature in the 19th century--romanticism, realism, and naturalism. American writers, however, concentrated on the American scene and sought to affirm a distinct national identity. COLONIAL LITERATURE The colonial period extends from the Virginia and Massachusetts settlements of the 17th century through the Great Awakening, a religious revival in the 1740s, and its aftermath. Although dominated by Puritan-Calvinistic doctrine, early American literature was not confined to religious subjects. The religious writings, as well as the more secular chronicles, are the history of exceptional individuals who rose above the physically difficult and spiritually demanding environment of the New World. These early writers set the tone and the rhetoric and foreshadowed the major concerns of later American writing. The first generation of settlers wrote sermons, religious tracts, diaries, and histories of their undertakings. The leading religious controversialists were John \Tcotton\t, Anne \THutchinson\t, Roger \TWilliams\t, and John \TWinthrop\t. Winthrop's Journal, originally printed as a History of New England from 1630 to 1649, remains a major historical source. It was followed by William \TBradford\t's History of Plymouth Plantation (pub. 1856); Edward Johnson's History of New England (1654); and Thomas \TMorton\t's New English Canaan (1637), which stands out for its irreverence and hints of bawdiness. Histories of the South with enduring literary qualities were Capt. John \TSmith\t's The Generall Historie of Virginia (1624) and, much later, William \TByrd\t's History of the Dividing Line (composed and reworked from 1728 but not published until 1841). Puritan writers stressed religious and didactic themes. The first book published in America was the Bay Psalm Book: The Whole Book of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (1640). Michael \TWigglesworth\t continued in the Puritan vein, exhorting against sin in his popular poem, Day of Doom (1662). Meanwhile, poetry of genuine accomplishment and a less stern, Puritan emphasis was written by Anne \TBradstreet\t in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) and by Edward \TTaylor\t, whose poems were not discovered until 1939. More in accord with the Puritan temperament are the spiritual autobiographies, which describe the Puritan experience of conversion. Thomas Shepard's The Sincere Convert (1640) is one of the first; Jonathan Edwards's "Personal Narrative," first published in 1765 in the Life of the Rev. J. Edwards by the theologian Samuel Hopkins, is one of the last. The memorable works of the colonial period depicted the conditions of life in the New World. The first and best-known narrative of captivity by Indians was Mary \TRowlandson\t's Captivity and Restauration (1682). Among diarists, Sarah Kemble Knight's account of her journey (1704) from Boston to New York on horseback and Samuel \TSewall\t's diaries (spanning 1673 to 1729) describe life in the colonies. The Puritan literary ideal is best summed up in the gargantuan ecclesiastical history by Cotton Mather, the Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England from its First Planting in the New Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord 1698 (1702). This compendium celebrates America and its religious Puritan leaders in a rhetoric of magnificent extravagance. An equally intense piety pervades the writings of Jonathan \TEdwards\t early in the 18th century. Besides his spiritual autobiography, Edwards is known for A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) and Freedom of the Will (1754), both of which try to incorporate the philosophy of John Locke, and for what is probably the most famous sermon of hellfire and brimstone ever preached, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741). The young Benjamin \TFranklin\t wrote during the same period as Edwards. Although his Poor Richard's Almanack (1732) anticipated a more rational moralism, it contained much of the proverbial wisdom that Franklin had learned from works such as Cotton Mather's Bonifacius, or Essays To Do Good (1710). Similarly, Franklin's Autobiography reflected a concern for one's actions that was typical of the Puritan spiritual autobiographers. REVOLUTIONARY LITERATURE The American Revolutionary period extends from the first agitations by patriots in the early 1760s through the adoption of the Constitution in 1787. The ardor and disputatiousness characteristic of the Puritans was felt early in this period in the sermons of Jonathan Mayhew and in the political tracts of the patriots. Prominent among the so-called pamphleteers were James \TOtis\t, who wrote five controversial and often intemperate pamphlets; John \TDickinson\t, the author of a series of letters widely printed in newspapers during 1767 and 1768 and signed "A Farmer in Pennsylvania"; and John \TAdams\t, the author of A Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law (1765), the first of a long series of works more properly considered philosophical literature than political pamphlets. It was, however, Thomas \TPaine\t's pamphlet Common Sense, advocating American independence, that had the greatest revolutionary impact in the colonies and that received the most attention abroad. The Revolution itself fostered an outpouring of patriotic verse, much of it consisting of satirical attacks on the Loyalists. The most popular of the satires was John Trumbull's M'Fingal, a burlesque of Tory politics written in 1775 and expanded in 1782. Trumbull was a leading figure among the Connecticut Wits, who wrote satires similar to his own. A common poetic subject of the Revolutionary period, the coming greatness of America, was expressed in the title of the Princeton college commencement poem of 1771, On the Rising Glory of America (1772), written by Philip \TFreneau\t in collaboration with Hugh Henry Brackenridge. American literature during this period continued to be expressed largely in histories, journals, personal diaries, letters, and political writing conceived in the revolutionary spirit. An exception was the accomplishment of Phillis \TWheatley\t, an African slave, who is now considered America's first important black writer. Her derivative but finely wrought Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London in 1773. The diverse prose of the time included the Journal (1774) of John \TWoolman\t, a Quaker; the Letters of an American Farmer (1782) by the French-born Jean de \TCrevecoeur\t; the Travels (1791) in the Floridas, Georgia, and the Carolinas of William Bartram; and the Revolutionary-period letters of Abigail \TAdams\t, the wife of John Adams. Probably the best-remembered works of the period are the state papers, beginning with Thomas \TJefferson\t's Declaration of Independence. In 1787 and 1788 Alexander \THamilton\t, John \Tjay\t, and James \TMadison\t collaborated in writing 85 essays defending the new Constitution and collected as The Federalist. The first American play, William Godfrey's The Prince of Parthia (1765), appeared during this period despite the moral censure accorded to theater in the colonies. A heroic tragedy in blank verse, it was first performed in 1767. It was followed by the first stage comedy to be produced in the United States, Royall \TTyler\t's The Contrast (1787), which introduced Jonathan, the first stage Yankee. EARLY NATIONAL LITERATURE The years from the adoption of the Constitution (1787) to the period of Jacksonian nationalism (1828-36) mark the emergence of a self-consciously national literature. The poet Joel \TBarlow\t, who was, like John Trumbull, one of the Connecticut Wits, greeted the new United States with his epic The Columbiad (1807), a reworking of his earlier The Vision of Columbus (1787). Philip Freneau wrote lyric poetry that fused the native scene and native expression. Other writers strove to develop an American literature but did not concentrate on strictly American subjects, using instead the universal themes of romance, virtue, vice, and seduction that pervaded popular novels in England and on the Continent. William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), an imitation of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, is regarded by some as the first American novel. Susanna Rowson's sentimental and didactic tale of seduction, Charlotte Temple, published (1791) in London as Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, was extremely popular. In contrast to the prevailing sentimental novel was Hugh Henry Brackenridge's massive Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), a picaresque novel with an underlying satire on bad government. The first professional novelist was Charles Brockden Brown, whose gothic and philosophical romances, beginning with Wieland (1798), anticipated Edgar Allan Poe. Early in the 19th century, Washington \TIrving\t gained European recognition as America's first genuine man of letters. A History of New York (1809) is a whimsical satire of pedantic historians and literary classics. His best-known tales, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, which was published serially in 1819-20. William Cullen \TBryant\t emerged in the 1820s as a poet of international stature. His "Thanatopsis" (1817), influenced by the English \TGraveyard Poets\t, linked American literature to the emerging English \Tromanticism\t. Still, despite European influences, American writers attempted to create a distinctive literature during a time of rising literary nationalism. Noah \TWebster\t contributed An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), in which he insisted that the country possessed its own language. The nationalist theme was echoed by William Ellery \TChanning\t, Edward \TEverett\t, and most memorably by Ralph Waldo \TEmerson\t in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, "The American Scholar" (1837), which Oliver Wendell \THolmes\t called "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." James Fenimore \TCooper\t was the first important American novelist to succeed with subjects and settings that are largely American. Cooper achieved international prominence with his second novel, The Spy (1821), a tale of the Revolution. His many novels blending history and romance resulted in his being called "the American {Sir Walter} Scott," a title that put him in the company of one of the period's most popular and respected authors. Cooper became best known for his Leatherstocking Tales, five novels that run from The Pioneers (1823) to The Deerslayer (1841). Cooper's settings capture the American idea of nature, and his hero, Natty Bumppo, expresses the self-reliant, pioneering spirit of America. Much of Cooper's sense of America was caught by the Fireside Poets, who celebrated American history and a benign American nature. Henry Wadsworth \TLongfellow\t displayed his skill at telling a story in verse in Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and Evangeline (1847). But Longfellow and his contemporaries succeeded best in public poetry intended for recitation. Still powerful are Longfellow's The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1863), John Greenleaf \TWhittier\t's "Barbara Freitchie" (1863), and Oliver Wendell Holmes's "Old Ironsides" (1830). Edgar Allan \TPoe\t stood apart from literary nationalism and represented a gloomier side of romanticism. As a reviewer, he was a harsh critic of second-rate American writing, but he dabbled in many popular sensationalistic forms. His often technically complex poetry uses commonplace romantic themes but gives them a philosophical and mystical application. Many of his short stories remain internationally famous, and he may be said to have invented the detective story. In "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe perfected the tale of gothic horror. AMERICAN RENAISSANCE The American renaissance, also known as the American romantic movement, began with the maturing of American literature in the 1830s and 1840s and ended with its flowering in the 1850s. During the 1830s Ralph Waldo Emerson established himself as the spokesman for \Ttranscendentalism\t, first set forth in his essay Nature (1836). The group known as the \Ltranscendentalis\lts that gathered around him in Concord, Mass., included Bronson \TAlcott\t, Margaret \TFuller\t, Theodore \TParker\t, and William Ellery Channing, who joined with Emerson in the publication of \TDial\t magazine (1840-44). They subscribed to Emerson's faith that all people are united in their communion with the oversoul, a postreligious equivalent of God. Each individual, Emerson said, finds his or her own way to transcendence through self-knowledge, self-reliance, and the contemplation of nature. Henry David \TThoreau\t came closest to putting Emerson's ideas into practice. After two intermittent years at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., he wrote Walden or Life in the Woods (1854). In this book, Thoreau observes nature from the viewpoint of a naturalist-philosopher reflecting on the quiet desperation of humanity and the transcendental solace of the natural world. No less consciously indebted to Emerson was WALT \TWhitman\t, who dedicated the first edition of his poetry, Leaves of Grass (1855), to him. Whitman celebrated an untrammeled communion with nature with overtones of sensuality that appeared shocking even though his poetry expressed sound transcendental doctrine. Whitman also took seriously Emerson's appeal for American originality; he devised a loose, "natural" form of versification that seemed unpoetic and jarring to his contemporaries. After the Civil War, Whitman gained wider acceptance with his elegy on the death of Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," (1865). Whitman's prose works include Democratic Vistas (1871), containing his philosophy of American democracy along with prophecies of its future greatness and the coming greatness of its literature, and Specimen Days (1882), an autobiographical account of his Civil War experiences as a voluntary nurse. Unknown to the public, another American innovative poet, Emily \TDickinson\t, was writing in Amherst, Mass. Her poems, written mostly from the late 1850s through the 1860s, were unconventional and deceptively simple lyrics concerned with death, eternity, and the inner life. Few were published in her lifetime, but when her poems were rediscovered in the 1920s, Dickinson took her place as a major American poet. Nathaniel \THawthorne\t represents American romanticism with its roots firmly planted in the Puritan past. His stories were collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837), which established his importance as an American writer. Some were tales of the Puritans and of early American history; others used a mixture of symbolism and allegory that, together with certain recurrent themes, were carried over into Hawthorne's novels. His masterpiece, the Scarlet Letter (1850), is a symbolic romance set in Puritan New England. Hawthorne had been attracted to Emerson's thought but rejected its optimism both here and in The Blithedale Romance (1852), a novel based on the transcendentalists' utopian experiment, \TBrook Farm\t. Herman \TMelville\t also rejected Emerson's philosophy. His first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), based on his own adventures after deserting his ship while on a whaling voyage, challenged the spiritual substance of Christianity. Melville continued to write of the sea and adventure, but now with increasing philosophical complexity and a mixture of allegory and symbolism comparable to Hawthorne's. The culmination of his growth came in Moby Dick (1851). This philosophical adventure satisfied the age's aspiration for a great epic of nature and America, yet its greatness was not recognized at the time. Certainly it came nowhere near the success of the great best-seller Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher \TStowe\t. After the failure of Melville's next novel, Pierre (1852), Melville continued to write, but he became increasingly discouraged with his inability to reach an audience. At his death in 1891 he was virtually unknown. He left behind poetry on Civil War themes, notably Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) and the short, unfinished novel Billy Budd. These and other late manuscripts, neglected for many years, were rediscovered in the 1920s by critics and scholars, whose reassessments established Melville as a superior American writer. POST-CIVIL WAR LITERATURE The post-Civil War period is roughly the period from the rise of realism to the advent of naturalism, up to World War I. The Civil War itself affected literature less than did the industrial expansion that came in its aftermath. Nevertheless, the war was the basis for poetry by Melville, Emerson, Lowell, and Whitman, and of significant autobiographical accounts by Thomas Wentworth \THigginson\t, Charles Francis \TAdams\t Jr., and Ulysses S. \TGrant\t. Mark \TTwain\t led the movement away from the romanticism typical of the American renaissance to a worldly realism that dealt with actual places and situations. In his dialogue he produced equivalents of American speech never before attempted. Twain drew extensively from his personal experiences: on his own travels for The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), on his days as a river boat pilot for Life on the Mississippi (1883), and on his youth for his boyhood stories Tom Sawyer (1876) and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Huckleberry Finn is considered by many critics to be the first modern American novel; it is more than likely the best known and is undoubtedly one of the great American literary achievements. The choice of the pen name Mark Twain by Samuel Clemens followed a practice common among American humorists who wrote during the 19th century. After Augustus B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835), James Russell Lowell wrote as Hosea Bigelow, Joel Chandler \THarris\t as Uncle Remus, David Ross Locke as Petroleum V. Nasby, Charles Farrar Browne as Artemas \TWard\t, and Finley Peter \TDunne\t as Mr. Dooley. As novelists and critics, William Dean \THowells\t and Henry \TJames\t contributed to the shift from romance to realism. Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) concerns an ordinary farmer who becomes wealthy and moves to Boston but whose spiritual rise comes about only when he loses his wealth. Despite a prolific output, Howells's significance rests mostly on his literary criticism and his opposition to provincialism in American literature. James departed even further from the provincial scene. He portrayed expatriate Americans in a European setting in Daisy Miller (1879) and in his triumph of psychological realism, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Conversely, James presented the reactions of Europeans to a New England background in The Europeans (1878). In The Bostonians (1886) he satirized New England reformers and philanthropists. As prolific as Howells, James was also a self-conscious critic and an advocate of realism. In his last novels, notably The Golden Bowl (1904), James created a new, complex language and symbolism for the novel that heralded the age of modernism. Regionalism, the literature of particular sections of the country, flourished, however. Many authors who used this form of realistic local color were women, among them Willa \TCather\t, Kate \TChopin\t, Mary E. Wilkins \TFreeman\t, Ellen \TGlasgow\t, Sarah Orne \TJewett\t, and Edith \TWharton\t. Other writers of the period who are thought of as regionalists are Ambrose \TBierce\t, Hamlin \TGarland\t, and Bret \THarte\t. Much of the literature of black Americans was regional in setting, by force of circumstance. Charles \TChesnutt\t and William Wells Brown were early black novelists. In Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), the poet and novelist Paul Lawrence \TDunbar\t used dialect and humble settings in a blend of pathos and humor. Some of the most powerful writing by black Americans has been autobiographical; in the post-Civil War period, works depicting the experiences of black Americans include The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Up from Slavery (1901) by Booker T. \TWashington\t, the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) by James Weldon \TJohnson\t, and The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by W. E. B. \TDu Bois\t. In the 1890s novels emphasizing a harsher view of reality began to appear, marking the beginnings of American naturalism. Stephen \Tcrane\t's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) was little noticed, but his Red Badge of Courage (1895) was immediately recognized as a classic. Frank \TNorris\t more nearly exhibited the features of naturalism than did Crane, especially in McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903). Norris's works, often concerned with the Darwinian struggle for survival, focus upon human greed, depravity, and suffering. Theodore \TDreiser\t created the most striking naturalistic works, beginning with Sister Carrie (1900) and culminating in An American Tragedy (1925). Dreiser's works reflect compassion and an understanding of human motivations. They analyze with dramatic insight the dilemma of the individual in contemporary society. Social protest and utopianism went hand in hand with naturalism. Upton \TSinclair\t exposed the deplorable conditions in the meat industry in The Jungle (1906); Jack \TLondon\t rejected society in his autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909); and Jacob \TRiis\t depicted the lives of poor immigrants in photographs and words in How the Other Half Lives (1890). Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams (1918), critically and ironically explored the quest for meaning in the face of social, historical, and economic change. American poets in the early part of the 20th century led in developing literary modernism. Vachel \TLindsay\t and Carl \TSandburg\t followed in the Whitman tradition of loose versification and the celebration of America, as, to some extent, did Edgar Lee \TMasters\t in his Spoon River Anthology (1915). More traditional in form yet more penetrating in psychology were the works of Edwin Arlington \TRobinson\t and, particularly, Robert \Tfrost\t. By the 1930s Frost had become America's best-known and most beloved native poet. Two American expatriates in London, Ezra \Tpound\t and T. S. \TEliot\t, became leading poets of the century. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) represents the extreme of complexity and profundity in modern poetry. Two of Eliot's contemporaries, Wallace \TStevens\t and William Carlos \TWilliams\t, were possibly as influential as Eliot on the rising young poets. Williams, in particular, extended into \Timagism\t Whitman's exploration of American themes and rhythms. POST-WORLD WAR I LITERATURE American literature of the 1920s was characterized by disillusionment with ideals and even with civilization itself. The writers of the so-called lost generation reacted with disillusionment to the war and adopted the despairing tone of The Waste Land. The young poet e e \TCummings\t used his wartime experience as the basis for a novel, The Enormous Room (1922), as did John \TDos Passos\t and William \TFaulkner\t. Ernest \THemingway\t, however, captured the experience of war and the sense of loss most lucidly in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), which probes the experience of a group of disillusioned expatriates in Paris, and in A Farewell to Arms (1929). American writers gathered in Paris during the 1920s, partly to escape what they regarded as the small-town morality and shallowness of American culture. Among them, F. Scott \TFitzGerald\t had the greatest success in the United States. His masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), helped create the image of the Roaring Twenties, the age of the flapper, and the jazz age. In the United States, a group of writers chronicled their escape from small-town America and exposed its hypocrisies. Sherwood \TAnderson\t inspired the rest with Winesburg, Ohio (1919), based on Anderson's hometown of Clyde, Ohio. Sinclair Lewis attacked provincialism in Main Street (1920) and added a word meaning "unthinking conformist" to the language with Babbitt (1922). H. L. \TMencken\t took up the attack on the "booboisie" in his essays, as did Ring \TLardner\t in his sports stories and, at the end of the decade, Thomas \TWolfe\t in the autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929). The influence of European modernism reached the United States during this period. Gertrude \TStein\t's experiments with the sounds and speech patterns of the American language, developed earlier in Paris, influenced Hemingway and many others. Marianne \TMoore\t edited the Dial magazine and for several decades influenced American poetry with her disciplined, often unconventional verse. Hart \Tcrane\t attempted an alternative to Eliot's less vernacular modernism with his American epic, The Bridge (1930). William Faulkner assimilated the technique of the \Tstream of consciousness\t \Tnovel\t from James Joyce's Ulysses and put it to use in The Sound and the Fury (1929). The doctrines of modernism were championed in little magazines such as the Criterion, Dial, and Hound and Horn. Meanwhile, American literature began to be studied critically. D. H. \TLawrence\t's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) was followed by William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain (1925) and V. L. \TParrington\t's Main Currents in American Thought (1927-30). During this period the American drama flowered, primarily because of Eugene O'NEILL's plays. With such brooding, symbolic, and intensely psychological works as The Emperor Jones (1920), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), and his later, poetically autobiographical masterpiece Long Day's Journey into Night (1956), O'Neill set a new standard for American playwrights. He was joined by a host of talented dramatists, including Maxwell \TAnderson\t, Philip \TBarry\t, Lillian \THellman\t, Elmer \Trice\t, Thornton \TWilder\t, and later by Edward \TAlbee\t, Arthur \TMiller\t, and Tennessee \TWilliams\t. THE 1930s The depression and the rise of fascism in Europe dominated American literature during the 1930s. Proletarian literature consciously aimed at stimulating protest--and, in some cases, revolution--by the working class. John Dos Passos chronicled the age in his trilogy U.S.A. (1930; 1932; 1936). James T. \TFarrell\t supplied naturalistic detail in Studs Lonigan (1935), as did Meyer \TLevin\t in The Old Bunch (1937). The plays of Clifford \TOdets\t and Sidney \TKingsley\t and John \TSteinbeck\t's immensely successful The Grapes of Wrath (1939) are better remembered today than are the more overtly political works of the time. Concurrent with socially conscious literature, a detached school of literary criticism emerged. The \TNew Criticism\t was represented by Yvor \TWinters\t and Richard P. Blackmur and was dominated by the Southern critics Cleanth \TBrooks\t, John Crowe \TRansom\t, Allen \TTate\t, and Robert Penn \TWarren\t. Relatively untouched by the literary or political developments of the period were such innovators as Henry \TMiller\t and Nathanael \TWest\t. From the 1930s a great many American writers have used the short story as their principal means of expression. Notable exponents of this form were John O'HARA and Katherine Anne \TPorter\t, who were followed in the 1940s and '50s by Carson \TMcCullers\t, Eudora \TWelty\t, and Flannery O'CONNOR. Such writers as Donald \TBarthelme\t, and John \TUpdike\t continue to devote much of their energy to short fiction, as did John \TCheever\t. The detective short story and novel were also perfected in the 1930s by James M. \TCain\t, Raymond T. \TChandler\t, and Dashiell \THammett\t. LITERATURE SINCE WORLD WAR II Many of the new writers of the 1940s and '50s were affected by World War II but did not always express their concern explicitly. James \TJones\t, with From Here to Eternity (1951), and Norman \TMailer\t, with The Naked and the Dead (1948), made their reputations as war novelists. The poets Randall \TJarrell\t, Robert \TLowell\t, and Karl \TShapiro\t wrote of the war but later, like Delmore \TSchwartz\t and Theodore \TRoethke\t, turned their attention to private events. American drama began to flourish once again in the years after the war. Tennessee Williams explored the themes of innocence and experience in The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) is a classic modern tragedy. Edward Albee introduced the tradition of the \Ttheater of the absurd\t in The Zoo Story (1958) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). The appearance of Saul \TBellow\t's The Victim (1947) and Bernard \TMalamud\t's The Assistant (1957) seem, in retrospect, the first signs of what is loosely described as a "Jewish movement." During the 1950s and '60s many Jewish writers emerged, including Herbert \Tgold\t, Philip \TRoth\t, and J. D. \TSalinger\t. The social movements of the 1960s--youth, counterculture, antiwar protest--profoundly affected literature. The Vietnam War gave rise to journalism by Mary \TMcCarthy\t, Susan \TSontag\t, and Frances Fitzgerald; the memoir Dispatches (1977), by Michael Herr; and novels by Robert Stone (Dog Soldiers, 1974) and Tim O'Brien (Going after Cacciato, 1978). The protest writing of the 1960s and '70s was influenced by earlier experiments in which fictional techniques were used for nonfiction writing. Truman \TCapote\t's In Cold Blood (1965), an account of a murder, and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song (1980) are examples of this mode. Tom \TWolfe\t's exuberant, rhetorical prose in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) helped establish the "new journalism" (see \Tjournalism\t). From the 1960s a great many American writers aligned themselves with ethnic and feminist causes. Ralph \TEllison\t's \TInvisible Man\t (1952) kept within the mainstream of literary tradition. The poet Gwendolyn \TBrooks\t and the playwright Lorraine \THansberry\t (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959) also worked within established conventions, and James \TBaldwin\t began as a writer of traditional prose. In The Fire Next Time (1963), however, Baldwin's work grew increasingly committed to the black protest movement of the 1960s and '70s. He was followed by the angry writings of Imamu Amiri \TBaraka\t (LeRoi Jones), Eldridge \TCleaver\t, and Ishmael \Treed\t, and as by the less strident work of Toni \TMorrison\t, Nikki \TGiovanni\t, and Alice \TWalker\t. Women writers, partly inspired by the example of Betty \TFriedan\t's The Feminine Mystique (1963), also developed a distinct genre of writing that deals almost exclusively with feminine experience. Sylvia \TPlath\t assumed great importance for reasons that concerned her life as much as her poetry. Tillie \TOlsen\t (Tell Me a Riddle, 1961) and Grace \TPaley\t (The Little Disturbances of Man, 1959) produced humorous accounts of domestic life. The poets Denise \TLevertov\t, Adrienne \TRich\t, and Anne \TSexton\t also took up feminist concerns in the 1960s. Joan \TDidion\t (Play It as It Lays, 1970) described the contemporary situation of women in novels and essays. Joyce Carol \TOates\t, writing in both traditional and experimental forms, was the most prolific novelist of the period, whose women writers also include Elizabeth \TJaneway\t and Kate \TMillett\t. Styles of contemporary American literature are as diverse as its subject matter, and whereas several novelists, such as John \THawkes\t, have experimented radically with technique, others have worked within traditional narrative forms to produce work that draws on several modes of writing. Kurt \TVonnegut\t has used fantasy and science fiction; Bellow mingled philosophy with the epistolary novel in \THerzog\t; Gore \TVidal\t has exploited the historical novel; and John \TBarth\t, Joseph \THeller\t, and Thomas \TPynchon\t have written arcane, fantastic, but basically traditional narratives. Wright \TMorris\t, Walker \TPercy\t, and Peter \TTaylor\t have maintained the strong tradition of American regional writing, and the novel-of-manners tradition exemplified by Edith Wharton's works is continued in those of Louis \TAuchincloss\t. Among the most influential innovators of this period was the Russian-born Vladimir \TNabokov\t, who, after the publication of Lolita (1958) and Pale Fire (1962), became a best-selling U. S. novelist. The experiments of William S. \TBurroughs\t and William \TGaddis\t are celebrated but less widely read. John \TGardner\t, who began his career with ambitious attempts to create ironic, allegorical versions of myths, argued (in On Moral Fiction, 1979) in favor of what he called "moral," or socially responsible, fiction. Among poets a diversity of style and subject matter prohibits easy summary of the period. The publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) is often thought to have inaugurated a "confessional" mode in the work of such poets as Plath, Sexton, Levertov, and W. D. \TSnodgrass\t. The work of Charles \TOlson\t and the \TBlack Mountain school of poetry\t retained its importance to John \TAshbery\t, Robert \TBly\t, James \TMerrill\t, and James \TWright\t. W. S. \TMerwin\t, one of the most respected poets of his time, has developed his own distinctive manner from acquaintance with the styles of W. H. Auden, Robert Graves, and Ezra Pound. Allen \TGinsberg\t, developing out of the \Tbeat generation\t movement of the late 1950s, and Gary \TSnyder\t emphasized Oriental and American Indian spirituality. Two of the most notable poets of the 1960s and '70s, Elizabeth \Tbishop\t and Richard \TWilbur\t, seemed independent of influence or fashion, and they developed distinct and personal modes of utterance. The number of "little magazines" and small presses increased during the 1970s and 1980s, creating an unprecedentedly large number of opportunities for the publication of poetry. At the opening of the 1990s, American literature stood divided among special-interest groups and opposed aesthetics, although its oldest traditions remained recognizable and its major practitioners continued to think of themselves as social critics. Peter Shaw Bibliography: Barbour, J., and Quirk, T., eds., Writing the American Classics (1990); Bercovitch, S., ed., Cambridge History of American Literature, 5 vols. (1991); Chase, Richard, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957); Conn, Peter, Literature in America: An Illustrated History (1989); Cowley, Malcolm, The Flower and the Leaf: A Contemporary Record of American Writing since 1941 (1985); Donoghue, Denis, Reading America: Essays on American Literature (1987); Elliott, Emory, ed., Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988); Fiedler, Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (1966); Gates, Henry Lewis, Jr., ed., The Schomburg Library of 19th-Century Black Women Writers (1988); Gilbert, Sandra M., and Gubar, Susan, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century, vols. 1 and 2 (1987, 1988); Hobson, Fred C., Tell about the South (1983); Hoffman, Daniel, ed., Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (1979); Howard, Richard, Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the U.S. since 1950, rev. ed. (1980); Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, rev. ed. (1972) and A Writer's America (1988); Lawrence, D. H., Studies in Classic American Literature (1928); Marx, Leo, Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1967); Matthiessen, F. O., American Renaissance (1941; repr. 1968); Poirier, Richard, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (1966). See also: \Tblack American literature\t; such genres as the \Tnovel\t, \TStory\t, \Tscience fiction\t, and \TWestern\t.