The beginning of literature in America

The settlements of New England developed rapidly. Ten years after the landing of the "Mayflower" Pilgrims (more than twenty thousand people) lived in the colony and the majority were from England. And it was here in New England that the literature of the New American nation appeared. The Pilgrim Fathers played a historical role in this, although it was through no conscious desire of their own. Many of them were men of learning with a university education. They brought books on various subjects to America. They opened schools for the children and in 1636 founded Harvard College, the first American university. They also set up the first printing-press in the country and published the first books. But the American Puritans were not guided in this by any humanitarian desire to spread knowledge among the people. They were first and foremost religious fanatics, determined to subjugate everyone to their rigorous, dogmatic discipline: the school taught their religion to the children, the university trained clergymen for protestant churches in the colony which they hope would give them more power, and the books they published had the same purpose.

Although the only book they recommended for home reading was the Bible, they also printed various histories, journals, memoirs and theological tracts intended for the clergy who ruled the colony. The authors of these works were far from being professional writers but their writings tell the story of the colony and disclose the true nature of the puritanism of those days.

The power of Puritan theocracy lasted for three generations. The writers who fought for democracy in the colonies (Thomas Hooker, John Wise, Roger Williams) came into sharp controversy with the clergymen. [57]

Gradually, under the influence of French and German culture brought to America by new immigrants, theocracy was defeated and the number of secular poets and writers increased. Since the writers from the Northern colonies dealt with the life around them, of which they were an inseparable part, their works became a part of American national literature, while Virginia and other Southern colonies added but little to the creative literature of America. This is not surprising the planters lived in the colonies only with an eye to profit. They educated their sons in England. Intellectual life in the South was static. People lived in imitation of the old home, and there was very little contrast with theNorth.

American culture, however, cannot be really understood if we view it only in the light of European influence. American literature is now more than 300 years old. It is independent literature intimately connected with the history of the country and should not be considered as a branch of British literature because it is written in the English language. Literature not only reflects the particular period in which it is created, it always rests on the traditions of the country which reared it. Nor can the literature of the American nation be separated from Indian mythology and Negro folklore. Some of the Europeans who had come to America learned from their social laws and appreciated such human values as their love of freedom, their self-respect, their contempt for wealth. They compared these qualities with those of the white men who turned into beasts in their greed.

The Negroes contributed greatly to the development of the arts. Negro songs and acting have become part of American national music and drama. Negro folklore has given American literature a specific colouring: a mixture of jocularity and sadness.

American literature owes its revolutionary traditions, of course, to the War of Independence. And it owes much to the traditions of pioneering in the free lands of West. The people who grew up under the conditions of the frontier spirit handed down the traditions that produced such men as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and such poets and writers as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. To study their literature means to learn much about America's unrelenting fighters for justice and freedom. [58]