The Beginning of American
Literature
American has always been a land of
beginnings. After Europeans‘iscovered’ America in the fifteenth century, the
mysterious New World became for many people a genuine hope of a new life, an
escape from poverty and persecution, a chance to start again. We can say that,
as nation, America begins with that hope. When, however, does American
literature begin
American literature begins with American
experiences. Long before the first colonists arrived, before Christopher
Columbus, before the Northmen who ’found’ America about the year 1,000, Native
Americans lived here. Each tribe’s literature was tightly woven into the fabric
of daily life and reflected the unmistakably American experience of lining with
the land. Another kind of experience, one filled with fear and excitement, found
its expression in the reports that Columbus and other explorers sent home in
Spain, France and England. In addition, the journals of the people who lived and
died in the New England wilderness tell unforgettable tales of hard and
sometimes heartbreaking experiences of those early years.
Experience, then, is the key to early American literature. The New World
provided a great variety of experiences, and these experiences demanded a wide
variety of expressions by an even wider variety of early American writers.
These writers included John Smith, who spent only two-and a half years on
the American continent. They included Jonathan Edwards and William Byrd, who
thought of themselves as British subjects, never suspecting a revolution that
would create a United States of America with a literature of its own. American
Indians, explorers, Puritan ministers, frontier wives, plantation owner-they are
all the creators of the first American literature.
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