LITERATURE& PHILOSOPHY
Four centuries of American writing, from a Puritan sermon to Toni Morrison — the ideas, the voices, and the one native philosophy the country produced.
A literature that invented itself
America began with no literature of its own. For a century and a half it borrowed England's forms and wrote sermons. Then, in a few astonishing decades in the mid-nineteenth century, it found its own voice — and it has spent the hundred and fifty years since arguing about who gets to use it. This is the story of that argument.
Four centuries, eight arguments
Every era of American writing was arguing about something different. Click a band to see what.
Can a sermon be literature?
For a century and a half, American writing is sermons, diaries, captivity narratives and one remarkable poet. There are no novels because there is no audience and no printing economy to support them. What there is instead is a habit that never leaves American prose: the belief that writing is for examining your own conscience in public.
- Anne Bradstreet
- Cotton Mather
- Mary Rowlandson
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Explore the section
Oratory & Poetry
The Gettysburg Address ran 272 words and two minutes. A close reading of American speech as a written form.
Read →The American Novel
From Moby-Dick to the present, and the openings that announced a new literature.
Read →Transcendentalism
Emerson, Thoreau, and the argument that the individual conscience outranks the crowd.
Read →Pragmatism
America's one native philosophy: truth as the thing that works, from Peirce to Rorty.
Read →Science Fiction & Myth
How the frontier story left the West and went to space.
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