Early American literature

Could we just admit that colonial American literature is terrible and stop pretending that it’s worth reading?

If you enjoy Puritan religious screeds about how people are condemned to Hell, regardless of their good works, or if you enjoy political tracts about how an enlightened government should function, then, without question, colonial American literature is for you. For most readers, though, it’s God-awful boring stuff.

The comparable period of English literature (1600-1800), which is the late Renaissance through the early Romantics, has such luminaries as Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson, Swift, Pope, Coleridge, and Shelley, among many others, who are certainly worthy of the 1,000 pages they take up in the Norton Anthologies, but the 1,000 pages of the Norton for the same years are devoted to the likes of Mather, Edwards, Jefferson, and Franklin. What’s going on?

Understand that I certainly recognize the genius of these colonial writers, and their works are well worth studying if you’re interested in religion or political thought. My argument is that they aren’t “literature.”

So what is literature?

Literature has an imaginative complexity and ambiguity that forces readers to think deeply about human nature, their relationships with others, and their place in the universe. By “imaginative,” I mean the opposite of “functional,” which is prose that has a utilitarian purpose. In other words, narratives (fiction or non-iction), poetry, and drama qualify as “literature.

By my definition, which is admittedly subjective, American literature begins with Washington Irving’s Sketchbook in 1820, but it doesn’t fully blossom for another couple of decades until Hawthorne and Poe began writing their stories. Poetry took another decade or two (believe me, you can skip Longfellow and Whittier!), but by the Civil War, Whitman and Dickinson began writing, and so America truly had some original poetic genius to claim as its own.

Perhaps it simply took a few hundred years for American literature to get grounded, or perhaps it took a traumatic event like the Civil War to kick it into a higher gear, or perhaps simply too many intelligent men and women were too busy establishing a new republic to focus on the production of literature, but maybe it’s time to admit the obvious: American literature really begins ca. 1820. We can skip what came before.