Northeastern American Identity in Literature

Background

Many critics contend that early Northeast literature might more aptly be called English literature in America. There is truth in that contention, but even at the nation's beginning there were differences between British and American writing. Religion, specifically Calvinist doctrine, was an important factor in the nation's founding and has thus been reflected in American writing from colonial times onward. When the eighteenth century began, however, the native European Americans had become more secularized than their Puritan predecessors, and concepts of individual self-reliance, idealism, and the natural beauty of the land had taken firm hold in life and literature. The spirit of that period is best recognized in the writing of Philip Freneau, Charles Brockden Brown, and, arguably most famously, Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin came not from Puritan New England, but from the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack (1732–1757) combines a rustic presentation of miscellaneous data and his famous proverbs, which are summations culled from expressions of past wisdom. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791) is considered an American classic.

In the odes of Freneau, specifically The Wild Honeysuckle (1786), which is a lyric expression of emotional feeling for nature, and the novels of Brown, specifically Edgar Huntley: Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), with its impressionist descriptions of natural settings, readers encounter the stirrings of a literary appreciation of the American landscape that is revolutionary.

Early Novels

The Power of Sympathy (1789), often called the first American novel, was written by "a lady of Boston," who was later found to be not Sarah Wentworth Morton but rather William Hill Brown. The novel marks the American beginning of a long line of luridly sensational best-selling books written for women. These novels were frowned upon by religious and educational leaders. Under the guise of moral instruction, this British-derived genre tells of seduction, suicide, and betrayal, and is rife with sad revelations of the consequences of unwise love.

Another widely read romance of the type, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797), testifies to the popularity of these formulaic books. An 1805 issue of the Boston Monthly Anthology voiced indignation at the infection of ladies by such "vermin." The magazine's editors then rushed to review each new novel as it came off the presses. The sentimental novel captured the imagination of American women in the first years of independence and continued to be widely read well into the nineteenth century.

Hartford Wits and the Knickerbocker School

Aside from the sentimental novel, popular writing in the period surrounding independence was dominated by didactic, revolutionary pamphleteers seeking to separate themselves from Europe and define their place in the New World. The desire to break with European literature and create an indigenous writing style motivated the eighteenth century Hartford Wits, whose efforts represent the first focused attempt to establish formal American literary standards for aesthetic production. The Hartford Wits included such authors as Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, and Joel Barlow. Barlow's "The Hasty Pudding" (1793) and The Columbiad (1807) are two examples of literary works intended to glorify America.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century New York City surpassed Boston as the country's leading literary center, making for a slightly different Northeastern perspective in American literature. New York was home to the Knickerbocker School of writers. This loosely defined group was associated simply with being from New York. Among them were Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant. The Knickerbocker School took its name from the region, rather than from any shared style. Irving, perhaps the country's first great literary talent, was influenced by the Hudson River Valley and by Dutch legends about the region; these influences are felt in his impressionistic A History of New York (1809). The pleasures and challenges of the region's wilderness incited Cooper's imagination in the adventure novels known collectively as the Leatherstocking Tales, which are set in the country's earliest frontier. Bryant, a newspaper editor most of his life, is remembered for exploring humankind's relation to nature in such works as Poems (1821).

New England Developments

New England, and especially the intellectuals of Boston, Massachusetts, dominated the American literary into the nineteenth century. Among the most famous poets of the day was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, best known for three narrative poems, Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). The critic and poet James Russell Lowell became best known for The Biglow Papers (1848, 1867), a series of essays attacking slavery, opposing the war with Mexico, and opposing the annexation of Texas. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the first major humorist in American literature, is remembered for pieces such as "The Deacon's Masterpiece," a satire on Calvinism.

By the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, the religious and intellectual environment conducive to a free exchange of ideas was most strongly evident in New England, where Unitarians engaged in active cultural rebellion against the Calvinist church. Unitarian ministers interpreted the gospel for their congregations in accordance with their own conscience and intelligence, and thereby undermined Puritan prohibitions against individual imaginative inspiration. Such creativity cleared the way for major developments in American literature. The Transcendentalists, the intellectual counterparts of the Unitarian churchmen, were led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose Nature (1836) and essays defined the new school of thought as one rejecting scientific rationalism and adhering to the sufficiency of the individual. This talented literary circle formed the core of a robust Romantic protest against the doctrines of damnation, doubt, and pessimism preached by the Puritans. Aside from Emerson, Henry David Thoreau was the most famous of the Transcendentalists. Thoreau wrote a great number of antislavery articles and some poetry, but Walden (1854), with its clear narrative of Thoreau's two-year solitary sojourn in nature, recording the development of his theories and beliefs, sets him apart as one of the nation's finest prose stylists.

New Englander Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter and wife of clergymen, wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), an antislavery book. The book sold extremely well and was better known than any other American nineteenth century novel. The book stirred strong feeling against the fugitive slave laws. Stowe's novel is about slavery in the South; Harriet E. Wilson of New Hampshire wrote Our Nig (1859), an autobiographical novel about the pitiful life of an indentured black woman servant in the North. Her novel was the first by an African American to be published in the United States. New England regionalism was developed by "local colorist" writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett; her classic The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) masterfully displays Jewett's familiarity with her native Maine.

Whitman, Melville, and Hawthorne

In the mid-nineteenth century three Northeastern writers in particular emerged as leading American literary figures, helping to distinguish the country's literature compared to that of Europe. Walt Whitman, America's poet of optimistic individualism, and Herman Melville were New Yorkers whose writing reflects essential aspects of Northeastern identity and forged a lasting influence. Both writers had sympathy for ordinary life and common occupations. Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) speaks to the hopeful side of American freedom; Melville's Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851) gives readers the thunderous dark side.

Meanwhile, Nathaniel Hawthorne was a descendant of the Puritans of Massachusetts. His early work was influenced by Irving. Hawthorne's first book, laden with allegory and parables, is Twice-Told Tales (1837), a collection. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850), with its dark picture of the Puritan past, is recognized as a skillful blending of character development, mood, and poetic prose.

Poetry

Along with Whitman, several other poets have become closely associated with the literary identity of the Northeastern United States. Unknown in her lifetime, Massachusetts native Emily Dickinson never sought, with any diligence, publication for her poetry. Her verse is unique, having nothing in common with poetic schools or any regional theme. Dickinson relied entirely on her personal experiences and considered no theme too intimate or too trivial to record. She contributed to American literature a freedom in verse that was unsurpassed.

Poet Amy Lowell, with her collection Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), became a leader in poetic circles by advocating what Dickinson had practiced—that the language of verse resemble common speech and that freedom of choice and subject be absolute. Lowell's poetry helped to bring a focus not only to her brilliant work but also to the great contribution of her intellectual antecedents, Whitman and Dickinson. These poets contributed greatly toward a distinctly American poetry.

Perhaps the twentieth century's greatest regional poet, consummate New Englander Robert Frost, also was of the opinion that poetry should be precise and concentrated. His verse portraits of the rural landscape are direct, unaffected, and beautifully sensitive to realistic detail. Frost's famous poetry is recognized for its profound sense of the American spirit. He, more even than Whitman or Dickinson, is identified with the Northeast because he wrote specifically about it.

Drama

During the developmental years of American literature, poetry, short stories, and novels fared far better than drama in the Northeast. In Puritan-controlled areas any tendency to represent ideas through pantomime or physical representation was viewed harshly—theater was immoral; dancing was of the devil. Significantly, the first American dramatist to command worldwide praise, Eugene O'Neill, was born in New York City rather than New England. O'Neill, strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud's theories and Swedish playwright August Strindberg's techniques, brought a new degree of sophistication to American theater. Anna Christie (1921), a study of frustrated lives, is noted for its dramatic intensity and atmosphere of realism. O'Neill's plays won the Pulitzer Prize for drama four times, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936. Strains of the same Puritan influence found in the novels and short stories of, for example, Hawthorne, arguably also have a presence in the plays of O'Neill.

Through the twentieth century drama, like other literary forms, tended to pay more conscious attention to subjects such as regional identity in order to develop themes and explore ideas. New York playwright Arthur Miller used the haunting history of the Salem witch trials in The Crucible (1953), in which the issue of freedom of conscience and the witchcraft trials of 1692 are employed to invoke a parallel to America, suffering from delusions of widespread communist infiltration during the 1950s. Though not born in the Northeast, writer Thornton Wilder encapsulated small-town New England life in the play Our Town (1938). Set in the fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, Wilder's Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece used groundbreaking metatheatrical techniques and remained popular into the twenty-first century.

Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature

In the twentieth century the Northeast's dominance of American literature began to fade as new waves of writers from the South, Midwest, and West established themselves. However, Northeastern identity remained a common theme in many notable works. Some of the most revered classics of American fiction are set in the Northeast and so reflect specific elements of the region. For example, The Great Gatsby (1925) and other works by F. Scott Fitzgerald exemplify the urban excess of New York City during the Jazz Age, while The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger showcases both midcentury New York and Northeastern boarding school culture. Other successful authors who were both from and set works in the Northeast included Edith Wharton, H. P. Lovecraft, John P. Marquand, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John Cheever. Even travelogues by authors from outside the region often commented on its distinct natural and cultural character, such as A Hoosier Holiday by Theodore Dreiser (1916) and Travels with Charley (1960) by John Steinbeck.

Northeastern American literature also grew increasingly diverse in the twentieth century, making it essentially impossible to identify any monolithic regional style. The rich outpouring of works from the Harlem Renaissance, for example, including the poetry of Langston Hughes, can be seen as one strain of Northeastern identity in literature due to its focus on New York City. Indeed, New York's status as a hotbed of cultural innovation meant that many later twentieth-century literary movements had at least undercurrents of life in that urban melting pot. The Nuyorican Movement portrayed one subset of Latino American identity, while the antiestablishment Beat Poets as well as many literary depictions of gay identity also centered on New York City.

Meanwhile, authors born in the Northeast also continued to be influential on the national and international levels, and some became particularly known for directly incorporating regional settings and themes into their works. Examples include New Hampshire–born John Irving, who came to prominence with the novel The World According to Garp (1978); highly popular horror writer Stephen King, a Maine native whose stories and novels often take place in New England; and Dennis Lehane, whose Boston-set novels Gone, Baby, Gone (1998) and Mystic River (2001) were both also adapted into successful films. Born in Connecticut and long associated with the New Hampshire farm where he lived for many years, Donald Hall was best known as a poet but also wrote fiction and nonfiction, much of it with strong New England themes, right up to his death in 2018.

Bibliography

Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering of New England. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936. A widely reprinted classic.

Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Covers early Northeastern literature.

Canby, Henry Seidel. Classic Americans: A Study of Eminent American Writers from Irving to Whitman, with an Introductory Survey of the Colonial Background of Our National Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931. Traces the influence of the Northeast on American literature.

Crow, Charles L., ed. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003. This volume appraises regional literature in America from New England to the Pacific Northwest. The accomplishments and careers of regionalist geniuses such as Willa Cather, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain are also surveyed in this volume.

Joseph, Philip. American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age. Louisiana State UP, 2007.

Lockwood, J. Samaine. Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism. U of North Carolina P, 2015.

Murdock, Kenneth B. Literature and Theology in Colonial New England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949. Describes religious influences on the literature of the Northeast.

New, Elisa. New England Beyond Criticism: In Defense of America's First Literature. Wiley Blackwell, 2014.

"The Northeast." Language of the Land: Journeys Into Literary America, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/exhibits/land/landnort.html. Accessed 30 July 2019.

Traister, Bryce. American Literature and the New Puritan Studies. Cambridge UP, 2017.

Ziff, Larzer. The Literature of the Colonial Period. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Surveys the formative years of Northeastern literature.