remembered and quoted.
The 19th century
Early 19th-century literature
After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812,
American writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly
native. As if in response, four authors of very respectable stature
appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper,
and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary
development.Bryant, a New Englander by birth, attracted attention in his
23rd year when the first version of his poem "Thanatopsis" (1817) appeared.
This, as well as some later poems, was written under the influence of
English 18th-century poets. Still later, however, under the influence of
Wordsworth and other Romantics, he wrote nature lyrics that vividly
represented the New England scene. Turning to journalism, he had a long
career as a fighting liberal editor of The Evening Post. He himself was
overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington
Irving.Irving, youngest member of a prosperous merchant family, joined with
ebullient young men of the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (1807-
08), which took off the foibles of Manhattan's citizenry. This was followed
by A History of New York (1809), by "Diedrich Knickerbocker," a burlesque
history that mocked pedantic scholarship and sniped at the old Dutch
families. Irving's models in these works were obviously Neoclassical
English satirists, from whom he had learned to write in a polished, bright
style. Later, having met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted with
imaginative German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The
Sketch Book (1819-20), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works. He was the
first American writer to win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect
of British critics.James Fenimore Cooper won even wider fame. Following the
pattern of Sir Walter Scott's "Waverley" novels, he did his best work in
the "Leatherstocking" tales (1823-41), a five-volume series celebrating the
career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His skill in weaving
history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought
him acclaim not only in America and England but on the continent of Europe
as well.Edgar Allan Poe, reared in the South, lived and worked as an author
and editor in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City. His
work was shaped largely by analytical skill that showed clearly in his role
as an editor: time after time he gauged the taste of readers so accurately
that circulation figures of magazines under his direction soared
impressively. It showed itself in his critical essays, wherein he lucidly
explained and logically applied his criteria. His gothic tales of terror
were written in accordance with his findings when he studied the most
popular magazines of the day. His masterpieces of terror--"The Fall of the
House of Usher" (1839), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), "The Cask of
Amontillado" (1846), and others--were written according to a carefully
worked out psychological method. So were his detective stories, such as
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), which historians credited as the
first of the genre. As a poet, he achieved fame with "The Raven" (1845).
His work, especially his critical writings and carefully crafted poems, had
perhaps a greater influence in France, where they were translated by
Charles Baudelaire, than in his own country.Two Southern novelists were
also outstanding in the earlier part of the century: John Pendleton Kennedy
and William Gilmore Simms. In Swallow Barn (1832), Kennedy wrote
delightfully of life on the plantations. Simms's forte was the writing of
historical novels like those of Scott and Cooper, which treated the history
of the frontier and his native South Carolina. The Yemassee (1835) and
Revolutionary romances show him at his best.
The 20th century
Writing from 1914 to 1945
Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took form
in the years before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period
that followed the war left its imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary
forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in drama, poetry, and
fiction leading authors tended toward radical technical
experiments.Experiments in dramaAlthough drama had not been a major art
form in the 19th century, no type of writing was more experimental than a
new drama that arose in rebellion against the glib commercial stage. In the
early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling in Europe encountered
a vital, flourishing theatre; returning home, some of them became active in
founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the country. Freed from
commercial limitations, playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and
methods of production, and in time producers, actors, and dramatists
appeared who had been trained in college classrooms and community
playhouses. Some Little Theatre groups became commercial producers--for
example, the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915, which became the
Theatre Guild (first production in 1919). The resulting drama was marked by
a spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness and maturity.Eugene
O'Neill, the most admired dramatist of the period, was a product of this
movement. He worked with the Provincetown Players before his plays were
commercially produced. His dramas were remarkable for their range. Beyond
the Horizon (first performed 1920), Anna Christie (1921), Desire Under the
Elms (1924), and The Iceman Cometh (1946) were naturalistic works, while
The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) made use of the
Expressionistic techniques developed in German drama in the period 1914-24.
He also employed a stream-of-consciousness form in Strange Interlude (1928)
and produced a work that combined myth, family drama, and psychological
analysis in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).No other dramatist was as
generally praised as O'Neill, but many others wrote plays that reflected
the growth of a serious and varied drama, including Maxwell Anderson, whose
verse dramas have dated badly, and Robert E. Sherwood, a Broadway
professional who wrote both comedy (Reunion in Vienna [1931]) and tragedy
(There Shall Be No Night [1940]). Marc Connelly wrote touching fantasy in a
Negro folk biblical play, The Green Pastures (1930). Like O'Neill, Elmer
Rice made use of both Expressionistic techniques (The Adding Machine
[1923]) and naturalism (Street Scene [1929]). Lillian Hellman wrote
powerful, well-crafted melodramas in The Children's Hour (1934) and The
Little Foxes (1939). Radical theatre experiments included Marc Blitzstein's
savagely satiric musical The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and the work of Orson
Welles and John Houseman for the government-sponsored Works Progress
Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project. The premier radical theatre
of the decade was the Group Theatre (1931-41) under Harold Clurman and Lee
Strasberg, which became best known for presenting the work of Clifford
Odets. In Waiting for Lefty (1935), a stirring plea for labour unionism,
Odets roused the audience to an intense pitch of fervour, and in Awake and
Sing (1935), perhaps the best play of the decade, he created a lyrical work
of family conflict and youthful yearning. Other important plays by Odets
for the Group Theatre were Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), and
Rocket to the Moon (1938). Thornton Wilder used stylized settings and
poetic dialogue in Our Town (1938) and turned to fantasy in The Skin of Our
Teeth (1942). William Saroyan shifted his lighthearted, anarchic vision
from fiction to drama with My Heart's in the Highlands and The Time of Your
Life (both 1939).
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Context
Samuel Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835. He grew up in the town of
Hannibal, Missouri, which would become the model for St. Petersburg, the
fictional town where Huckleberry Finn begins. Missouri was a "slave state"
during this period, and Clemens' family owned a few slaves. In Missouri,
most slaves worked as domestic servants, rather than on the large
agricultural plantations that most slaves elsewhere in the United States
experienced. This domestic slavery is what Twain generally describes in
Huckleberry Finn, even when the action occurs in the deep South. The
institution of slavery figures prominently in the novel and is important in
developing both the theme and the two most important characters, Huck and
Jim.
Twain received a brief formal education, before going to work as an
apprentice in a print shop. He would later find work on a steamboat on the
Mississippi River. Twain developed a lasting afiection for the Mississippi
and life on a steamboat, and would immortalize both in Life on the
Mississippi (1883), and in certain scenes of Tom Sawyer (1876), and
Huckleberry Finn (1885). He took his pseudonym, "Mark Twain," from the call
a steamboat worker would make when the ship reached a (safe) depth of two
fathoms. Twain would go on to work as a journalist in San Francisco and
Nevada in the 1860s. He soon discovered his talent as a humorist, and by
1865 his humorous stories were attracting national attention.
In 1870, Twain married Olivia Langdon of New York State. The family
moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to a large, ornate house paid for with the
royalties from Twain's successful literary adventures. At Hartford and
during stays with Olivia's family in New York State, Twain wrote The Gilded
Age, co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 and The Prince and the
Pauper (1882), as well as the two books already mentioned. Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn was finally published in 1885. Twain had begun the book
years earlier, but the writing was done in spurts of inspiration
interrupted by long periods during which the manuscript sat in the author's
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