by Mark Innes

Created on: May 05, 2010   Last Updated: May 06, 2010

If the mark of great literature is how well it travels, then to many readers, American writing has always represented a more glamorous, ambitious counterbalance to the sometimes more staid and traditional cannon of ‘English’ Literature, and remains so to this day. 

For audiences the world over, the works of, say, Hemmingway and Steinbeck - staples of high school syllabi everywhere - simply are America; the sense of adventure, the vastness, the raw muscularity of the prose, the startling depiction of the underlying dangers of what was then still a relatively new world struggling with itself, are set in stark contrast to the often gloomy, claustrophobic fiction of Europe. 

Furthermore, in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald produced arguably the greatest novel not just of the modernist era  - simply to be the best novel of 1925 was some achievement - but also of the last century. Or at least, it is the novel which has the most to say about the brave new world - and its limitations - in a way which is still accessible, and still resonates today. Can the same be said of other modernists - a movement started by the American Ezra Pound - who unleashed their tour de forces that same year, such as say Joyce, or Woolf?

Whilst on stage, the names of America’s dramatic heavyweights are bywords for a willingness to challenge and expose the dominant ideology. Tennessee Williams, with A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for example; or Arthur Miller, for instance, in classic works such as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, took on the cultures and values of society with a boldness that few - if any - modern English writers seem able, or willing to match. 

The authors and play-writes cited above are, of course, hardly comprehensive. There is simply not enough room in one article to properly expound upon the full range, or even to give a potted history; from the earliest Colonialists such as Franklin; post-war-of-independence writers and thinkers including Emerson and Thoreau; novelists like Hawthorne, Melville; the poets Whitman, and Dickinson; the realist Twain; and the experimentalists James and Faulkner; the social satirist Wharton. The potential list of luminaries is enormous, and it is impossible to do each one justice.

However, the message is clear. The history of American literature is one of daring innovation and challenge; of the ability to capture the essence - no matter how painful - of an entire nation. But

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>