Influence of immigration on American literature

SIGNIFICANCE: Successive waves of immigration to the United States have produced myriad literary works by immigrants. Likewise, native-born writers have also traveled and lived abroad throughout the country’s history and have written from the unique perspective of being far from home. In both fiction and nonfiction, the literature of immigration highlights issues that are at the heart of the American experience: the search for self, the conflict between ethnic or national roots and individual identity, and the clash between cultures and generations.

Whatever metaphor is used to describe the ethnic makeup of the country—symphony, salad bowl, or patchwork quilt—the United States has been a nation of immigrants since its founding, and immigration has been a constant subject and theme of its literature. The very first works of American literature—such as John Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (which was first published in 1624 and included the story of Pocahontas) or William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1630)—were accounts of immigration and settlement in the New World.

Many of the classic works of American literature were in fact written by Europeans first venturing to America: J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, whose Letters from an American Farmer (1782) so accurately describes the new country and its inhabitants, was born in France. Thomas Paine, who wrote effectively in support of the American Revolution, was born in England. Anne Bradstreet, considered the first American poet, was also born in England and immigrated to Massachusetts with her husband in 1630. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Or, Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) was the start of a long line of Black American literature, much of it the story of forced immigration during slavery. Even some of the classic works of the nineteenth century are tales of immigration. One of the most popular works by the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was Evangeline (1847), which recounts the expulsion of French Canadians from Nova Scotia and their move to Louisiana during the eighteenth century, while the three central characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) are all recent English immigrants working out their fates in early Boston.

Literature of Second-Wave Immigration

The first great wave of immigration after the founding of the republic occurred between 1830 and 1860 and was northern European in origin, including English, Irish, and German settlers. However, it was during the second major wave—from the 1880s to the 1920s and mainly from southern and eastern Europe—that the literature of immigration became a distinct literary form. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor in 1886, and the lines from the Jewish American poet Emma Lazarus graced its base:

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

In 1892, Ellis Island began operating as the port of entry, and millions of immigrants from Greece, Italy, Poland, and other Slavic countries poured into East Coast ghettos.

To the more established residents of the United States, these new travelers were the true immigrants, and the literature they produced only confirmed their foreign origins. Books by and about the new immigrants highlighted their struggles. One of the first works of American realism was Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861), a story of Welsh factory workers in Virginia and the first in a line of exposés of the industrial exploitation of immigrants that would lead to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), the story of Lithuanian immigrants scraping out a living in the meatpacking industry in Chicago (and a novel that helped enact the country’s first Pure Food and Drug Act).

Works such as Mary Antin’s autobiography The Promised Land (1912) described how the dream of Americanization could come true for European immigrants. Most accounts of immigration during the late nineteenth century tended to focus on the hardships of the process: The Danish-born journalist Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), for example, documented unsafe conditions in crowded New York City tenements. Even when life was not physically hard, as in Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899), set in Creole areas around New Orleans, the conflict of different cultural codes could cause tragedy.

In 1916, the critic Randolph Bourne wrote in his essay “Trans-national America” that the idea of the melting pot was misleading. The first settlers did not have to assimilate into any existing culture, Bourne argued; immigrant cultures have always given vitality and variety to the country, and recent immigrants should hold on to their distinctive cultural habits. Many of the literary works of the period confirmed Bourne’s assumptions, even while most Americans ignored his plea. The protagonists in Abraham Cahan’s Yekl (1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) are Russian Jews who end up lost between two worlds, their culture of origin and the country where they dream of success. Anzia Yezierska’s stories and novels, such as Hungry Hearts (1923), depict similar difficulties of assimilation, especially for eastern European Jews. Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) fictionalizes the hardships of Bohemian (Czech) immigrants trying to eke out a living on the Western plains, while O. E. Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth (1927) is also set on the Western prairie and involves the difficulties for Norwegian immigrants trying to farm that harsh land.

Assimilation and Celebration

Restrictive federal legislation enacted in 1921 and 1924 limited immigration through more than one-half century. When immigration picked up again after 1965, the main points of debarkation were not European but Asian, Caribbean, and Central American. At the same time, the civil rights movement after the 1940s had created a new ethnic awareness, a consciousness of ethnic contributions to so many areas of life in America.

This new pride in turn spawned the rediscovery of older works of immigrant literature, and the creation of a new generation of ethnic writers. Both Mike Gold’s Jews without Money (1930) and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), for example, strongly autobiographical accounts of immigrant Jewish family life in New York’s lower East Side, were rediscovered during the 1960s, while a decade later Carlos Bulosan’s classic autobiography of Filipino immigration, America Is in the Heart (1943), was first reprinted (1973). During that same period, Maxine Hong Kingston’s powerful fictional memoirs The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) were published, as well as Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971), an account of his family’s migration from Mexico to the United States.

Historians started to question the underlying assumptions and the very terms used to describe immigration and assimilation: Namely, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963) and Michael Novak in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (1971). The renewed interest in ethnic and immigrant literature led to new studies—for example, Marcus Klein’s Foreigners: The Making of American Literature (1981) and Werner Sollors’s Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986)—which in turn led to a number of new ways of viewing American literature. Ethnic literature, Sollors argued, is the pattern for American literature; according to Klein, most twentieth-century American writers are “foreigners,” immigrants or the heirs of immigrants who reshaped the century’s literature.

During the last decades of the twentieth century, the American literary canon was transformed, as publishers rushed to include forgotten or rediscovered writers in their anthologies. Ethnic writers stepped forward to claim literary prizes: N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1969 for House Made of Dawn (1968), Alice Walker in 1983 for The Color Purple (1982), and Toni Morrison five years later for Beloved (1987). Writers emerged to tell the stories of every ethnic thread in the historical quilt of the United States. This discovery of ethnicity’s centrality in American life, as in the literary canon, meant that Americans increasingly embraced their immigrant backgrounds, often making or maintaining close contact with their countries of origin. Rather than producing stories of being torn between cultures, as in so many earlier twentieth-century accounts of immigration, writers by the end of the century increasingly celebrated their ability to live in two cultures, to transcend borders and boundaries. Frank McCourt’s popular memoir of his impoverished Irish childhood, Angela’s Ashes (1996), was both a celebration of the strengths of his Irish mother in the face of grinding poverty and a tribute to his success in the United States. Increasingly, writers could view both their pasts and their futures without fear or tension.

Any survey of American literature of the previous century or so confirms these trends. Such an examination might begin with the English Jewish writer Israel Zangwill’s popular 1908 play The Melting-Pot, which described the immigration process at the same time that it coined a misnomer to describe it. Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago newspaper columnist, created the fictional Irish bartender Mr. Dooley, who commented on every social and political event up to World War I, including immigration. A Dutch immigrant to the United States called his autobiography The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), while an immigrant from Slovenia, Louis Adamic, published Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America in 1932 and My America in 1938. Irish immigration was touched on in James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (1935); Italian American life in Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete(1939) and John Fante’s Wait Until SpringandBandini (1938). Thomas Bell wrote Out of This Furnace (1941), a novel detailing the hardships of immigrant Slovak laborers in western Pennsylvania steel mills, while William Saroyan made comedy out of the difficulties of his Armenian family in Fresno, California, in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934) and My Name Is Aram (1940). All of these works explored, in various degrees, the struggles of assimilation, the loss of individual identity in that process, and the pain of being torn between two cultures.

With the rise of a new ethnic consciousness after World War II, immigrant literature underwent an enormous transformation. The change was marked by the publication of Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), which traced Alex Haley’s ancestors back to Africa before slavery, became an enormously popular television series and helped to encourage similar discoveries in other ethnic histories. After Haley, new ethnic literary groups emerged, and new attitudes toward immigrant history were born. Older European immigrant groups would continue to be represented in the more diverse American literary range—for example, Polish American Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird (1965) or Italian American Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969)—but more immigrant literature was coming from other continents.

Caribbean American Literature

Caribbean immigration actually rose during the 1920s, when the flow from Europe was slowing. Early writers such as Claude McKay, who migrated from Jamaica in 1912, became a part of the Black American literary boom of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. McKay’s poetry was collected in Harlem Shadows (1922), and his novel Home to Harlem was published in 1928. The next generation helped to carve out a more distinctive Caribbean identity. Paula Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) is her best-known novel, but she published fiction for the next four decades, novels and short stories in which her characters (often women) work out their identities in a conflict between New York City and the West Indies.

The literary outpouring since the 1960s has been even more prolific, and almost every Caribbean island-state has been represented. Cuban American writers have included Cristina Garcia, whose novel Dreaming in Cuban appeared in 1992, and Paula Fox, who has written adult fiction (such as her novel A Servant’s Tale, in 1984) but who is better known as a children’s writer. Her book The Slave Dancer (1973) received the Newbery Medal. Oscar Hijuelos has written a series of novels set in both Cuba and the United States, and The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Writers who have immigrated from the Dominican Republic include Julia Alvarez, who wrote the novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), and Junot Díaz, whose short-story collection Drown (1996) was favorably reviewed, and whose first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua in the West Indies in 1949 and came to the United States when she was seventeen. She has written often of the Caribbean immigrant experience: in the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), as well as in short stories (At the Bottom of the River, 1983) and essays (A Small Place, 1988). Haitian Americans have been represented by Edwidge Danticat, the highly respected writer whose novel Breath, Eyes, Memory was published in 1994, whose collection of short stories Krik? Krak! (1995) was nominated for a National Book Award, and whose memoir of her family’s dual citizenship, Brother, I’m Dying (2007), was given the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2017, Haitian American author Ibi Zoboi published the novel American Street, a finalist for the National Book Award that follows a teenage girl's adjustment to life in Detroit after having been raised in Haiti.

Writers with ties to Puerto Rico, the Caribbean island that has been a US territory since the late nineteenth century, have included Piri Thomas, whose Down These Mean Streets (1967) has become a classic coming-of-age urban memoir, and Nicholasa Mohr, whose El Bronx Remembered (1975) and In Nueva York (1977) fictionalized the coming-of-age struggles of poor Puerto Rican women in New York. Judith Ortiz Cofer published poetry, a novel (The Line of the Sun, 1988), and a memoir (Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, 1990) in which two cultures and languages are only part of the mix of ethnic, class, and gender issues.

Asian American Literature

Even greater diversity and richness have characterized immigrant Asian American literature of the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, as the numerous anthologies and studies of this ethnic literature attest: for example, Jessica Hagedorn’s collection Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Asian American Fiction (1993) and Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling’s Reading the Literatures of Asian America (1992). Although Chinese immigrants have long been a part of American history, their literature was not always available (for example, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940, published in 1980). It was not until the appearance of Maxine Hong Kingston and then Amy Tan that Chinese American literature blossomed. Tan’s popular novels The Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) highlighted the conflicts between assimilation and the desire for ethnic identity, and between generations. A flurry of Chinese American fiction dealing with these immigrant conflicts quickly followed: Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991), Gus Lee’s China Boy (1991), David Wong Louie’s Pangs of Love (stories, 1992), and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993).

These themes of dual identity, the conflict between the desire for both ethnic roots and individual identity, characterize other Asian American literatures as well. The hardships of immigrant life were magnified for the Japanese Americans, who were interned in camps in the West during World War II, and that horrific experience has colored the fiction since then, including Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar (1973), Hisaye Yamamoto’s Seventeen Syllables, and Other Stories (1988), and Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World (1989).

Korean American literature—such as Ronyoung Kim’s Clay Walls (1987) and Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995)—has highlighted the hardships of immigration and the difficulties of dual identity. The same can be said for Indian American fiction—namely Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), and the works of Jhumpa Lahiri, whose collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2000, and whose novel The Namesake (2003) was made into a popular film.

Immigration and the American Literary Canon

Literature and art do not recognize national borders as walls or fences but, like ideas, flow easily back and forth from one country or continent to another, and this is particularly true in the literature of immigration and emigration. In addition to immigrants writing about their experiences coming to the United States, writers throughout American history have emigrated to other countries and written from that perspective. For example, Henry James based many of his novels and stories in Europe, often dramatizing the clash between nineteenth century American innocence and European experience. Both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot spent most of their careers writing in Europe. James and Eliot eventually became British subjects; Pound died in Italy. African American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin found France a more congenial environment after World War II than an America they experienced as racially oppressive.

In 2013, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian-born author who splits her time between her homeland and the United States, published the novel Americanah, which follows the character Ifemelu as she leaves her native Nigeria to live and attend school in the United States. This story of immigration not only focuses on the traditional issues of race and identity, but also on the sense of dissatisfaction that some immigrants may feel in struggling between two nations and cultures. In Cristina Henríquez's The Book of Unknown Americans (2014), a cast of characters from a wide range of countries, including Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, and Paraguay, relate their stories about why they came to America, describing the immigrant experience in terms of the search for the American dream while also emphasizing the straddling of two cultures and the increasingly contemporary issue of xenophobia in America. As the immigrant experience is an important topic for young-adult readers as well, Maria E. Andreu wrote a novel, titled The Secret Side of Empty (2014), about a second-generation immigrant girl who, upon the eve of her high school graduation, must come to terms with the fact that though she has been living in the United States since her parents emigrated from Argentina when she was a baby, she and her family have no legal documentation; therefore, she must figure out how to truly make a living in her own country under the constant risk of removal. Continuing the timeless theme of the immigrant's pursuit of the American dream, Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers (2016) presents a family's struggle, after having recently come to America from Cameroon, to make a better life for themselves despite persistent hardships in the "land of opportunity," particularly the 2007 financial crisis.

Meanwhile, Luis Alberto Urrea's The House of Broken Angels (2018), exploring the lives of generations of a Mexican American family, was widely considered especially pertinent to the time in which it was published, as the late 2010s, amid policy shifts overseen by an increasingly divisive federal government, saw a renewed focus on immigration related to the country's southern border. Also examining the American immigrant experience through the lens of family dynamics, Fatima Farheen Mirza published A Place for Us, which tells the story of a couple from India who immigrate to America to raise their family, in 2018 as well. In the interconnected short stories that make up Jean Chen Ho's Fiona and Jane (2022), the author sheds light on the impacts of immigration through the lives of two Asian American friends, whose parents had left Taiwan for the United States, growing up in Los Angeles.

Both immigrant and emigrant fiction and memoir record the lasting tension between ethnic or national roots and the desire for assimilation, the sense of living between two worlds. In the increasingly globalized, shrinking world of the twenty-first century, the literature of immigration can describe the movement of people between countries and cultures and thus make the journey for readers before they attempt their own. For this and other reasons, the literature of immigration will undoubtedly continue as a valuable and vital form in the American literary canon.

Bibliography

"Best 64 Books about Immigrants and Immigration for All Ages." The Immigrant Learning Center, www.ilctr.org/best-books-about-immigrants-and-immigration/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.

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Hutner, Gordon, editor. Immigrant Voices, Volume 2. Berkley, 2015.

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