What is most surprising about American literature in its first centuries is that it remained imitative for only a short time; the colonists' adventurous spirits seemed to infiltrate and bend their British inheritance. Even before the Revolutionary War and the country's political independence from England, literary forms germane to the colonists' experience were being created: the captivity narrative, the conversion narrative, the diary of exploration, the tale, and�most American of all�the autobiography.

Valuing their own experiences, the colonists might have read imported (and pirated) novels, such as Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, A Tale of Truth, but they wrote narratives that drew heavily on their lived existence. Early on, the colonists came to have a voice: writers in England could not presume to know what living in America was like. And just as these experiences ranged from the unspeakable to the evocative, so the writing that expressed them moved from simple yet sometimes opaque description to a lush exoticism, conveying readers to worlds both unbelievable and unfathomable.

American literature started with the simple clarity of good description. William Bradford, John Smith, Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Byrd II�all saw the country and its events as remarkable subjects for literary disclosure. Even as such writers as Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, and Edward Taylor documented religious struggles in their more ornate prose, much of early American writing was given to mapping: the visible world, like the invisible, held considerable wonders.

But comparatively straightforward descriptive writing soon evolved to include those most American of traits: the urge to narrate for pleasure (a task that might well include humor), the conviction that all writing�all expressive art�should have a moral purpose, and a relentless self-consciousness that made the author understand how contradictory the first two impulses might be. Above all qualities, American literature was hypercritical of its own motives, methods, and accomplishments�and it was not unusual for its authors to act as critics of their works during their writing careers.

The American themes of this literature also regularly evolved from the colonists' and, later, the citizens' experiences. Primary was the narrative exploration of the self, a character who might or might not be modeled on the author. "The Diary of Samuel Sewall" and "The Journal of John Woolman," like Mary French's "A Poem Written by a Captive Damsel" and "The Journal of Madam Knight" and Elizabeth Ashbridge's "Account," foregrounded the authentic author-persona and established a justification for art based on the real, even if that art was not intended as fiction.

By the late eighteenth century, the time of the publication of Benjamin Franklin's unfinished Autobiography, the apologia so noticeable in the seventeenth century was beginning to disappear. In the clearly voiced narrative of the aging statesman, the virtues of independence, and even idiosyncrasy, were unquestionable. Franklin told stories of his early poverty with relish, rather than being embarrassed by them; instead of playing a modest role as narrator, the Franklin character emphasized his egoism. Confidence became the hallmark of one aspect of the American identity, a confidence that Old World denizens would have felt came only with a privileged birth. Begun in 1771 and composed at various periods during the 1780s, Franklin's Autobiography told his version of his remarkable life with acerbity and irony (qualities that persist in American literature). The writer-persona's voice stressed moral and intellectual events, disguising many personal matters as it disclosed suitably instructive ones (as in "the art of virtue" section). Defined by Franklin, as well as by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the autobiography became a legitimate, if ultimately fictionalized, new American form.

Statesmen and political figures might write, but the emerging separate spheres of men's and women's cultures in the nineteenth-century United States made the profession of authorship dangerous for the white male. Washington Irving moved slowly into his true creative bent, the telling of tales, arriving at that field via the study of law, business, and his initial writing efforts�history. In his creation of Geoffrey Crayon, who narrated many of The Sketch Book tales in 1820, Irving combined his interest in the exotic and his flair for a dramatic�but supposedly real�voice. In the case of Edgar Allan Poe, cultural nervousness about the writing profession cut short his education at the University of Virginia; his guardian John Allan refused to fund studies beyond Poe's freshman year. The precocity of Poe's accomplished fiction�published largely during the 1840s�changed the parameters of what the fictional tale could encompass. His use of the first person misled readers to think he was the persona, and rather than being considered a seminal force in the creation of that most American literary form, the short story, Poe instead became an isolated example of an Americanized�that is, Southern�Gothicist. Had his early death not supported the latter description, Poe would now be better positioned as one of the earliest superior American writers, competent to draw on resources both subconscious and conscious, realistic and romantic, shaped in a prose that delivered maximum emotional effect. Poe the poet changed the linguistic affect of American narrative, relying on the subtle use of polished word choice and a wide range of narrative skills to bring the reader the totality of a work's meaning.

Although Poe wrote the novel-length piece The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the American male writer early in the nineteenth century left the province of longer narratives to women, writers who were considered less serious. Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton (1797 and following, published anonymously until 1866) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Redwood (1824) and Hope Leslie (1827) were the best of the flood of pages written by such women novelists as Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Lydia Sigourney, and Lydia Maria Child. Sedgwick's work, published concurrently with the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, showed great empathy with groups already marginalized in United States culture�Native Americans, Shakers, prisoners, slaves, and women. It was in Cooper's oeuvre, however, that readers both in the United States and abroad found a prolegomenon for life in the new country, imaged in his novels as a contest of brave men poised against a land metaphorically armed against the invasion of Western civilization. Sometimes described in quasi-sexual terms, again as a paean to natural beauty, Cooper's narratives, whether about the Revolutionary War or the exploration of the frontier (the five Leatherstocking Tales, beginning with The Pioneers in 1823), gave the reader a sometimes stereotypical cast of characters, but characters who in themselves reinforced the value�even the morality�of possessing the New World of America.

What became apparent in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper particularly was the power of the freedom to own�that is, to conquer�land. If land ownership meant dispossessing the Indians and the Spanish who held it, war and other kinds of brutality were justified. How to move from a culture that was intrinsically Christian to one decidedly imperial and warmongering was a conundrum: much of the change in thinking, if change it was, occurred from the gospel of American literature.

The nineteenth-century focus on land ownership, and the identification and challenge of the frontier and its coercive power to attract settlers, created new strata of citizenry. The daring were the victors: the huge wealth to be won in the West, whether through gold strikes, monopolistic practices of industrial giants, or railroad building, seemed to justify the deaths that accompanied each of those enterprises. Philosophically, the somewhat romanticized freedom to own land, even to its possible destructive consequences, seemed integral to the freedom to be an individual, defined in American terms. Convinced of the difference in being American, U.S. citizens poured their energies�and often their lives�into the settlement of the country. They may have been poor in possessions, but they saw themselves as rich in possibilities, including the possibilities of land acquisition and attainment of sheer personal space.

It may be that the tangible marker of the frontier�as well as the uncharted lands west of the Mississippi�was the largest inducement to the thousands of immigrants who began arriving early in the nineteenth century, and who, by later in that century, had created such hostility based on national identities, class privilege, and race that many immigration quotas were already in place. Even though some immigrants got no farther west than the ghettos of New York and Boston, the promise of the frontier still gleamed alluringly. In a literature filled with immigrant narratives, many of them agonizing, one finds echoes of earlier accounts of racial inequity in the words of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Harriet E. Wilson, and others.

The freedom to own land also had as a corollary the freedom to not be owned. Whether translated as slavery outright, domestic servitude, or women's rights in general and reproductive rights in particular, the promise of such freedom caused not only the Civil War but thousands of pages of writing about the issues. In the mainstream of American writing in the mid-nineteenth century came Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), the story of individual freedoms trampled by institutionalized religion and social hierarchies even as they are encouraged by the New World's natural community. While Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) spoke as a powerful abolitionist text, it also set up an idealized biracial Christian community. In some respects, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), despite its adventure-tale trappings, reinforced some of the same paradigms�the community of men representing different cultures, classes, and beliefs on board ship, the search for Christian understanding in the face of natural forces, and its opposite�the search for vengeance.

The nexus of these novels in the early 1850s gave a new meaning to Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1837 address at Harvard. "The American Scholar" as defined therein was to speak with eloquent new language and voice about themes germane to the pristine promise of the New World. Countered by the passage of the brutalizing Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, however, Emerson's panacea was short-lived. For all the beauty and efficacy of the poetry of both Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, it may be that the latter's Specimen Days (1882) will be seen to be as central to the project of expressing the crucial themes of American letters as his Leaves of Grass (1855�1881). How long can anyone exist in isolation? Even the most independent American�whether Henry David Thoreau or Harriet Jacobs�finally admits the need for community. A further question then becomes, How diverse can the elements of such a community be?

Mark Twain gave readers one set of answers; Henry James provided another. Between the two, late-nineteenth-century Americanists saw their culture whole, through the lens of a realism that would not disguise people's motives. The heart of literature was character, and the ideal subject for U.S. fiction was the American character. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) drew figures based on his own wide life experiences�as printer, riverboat pilot, Confederate soldier, miner, reporter, lecturer�and published most of his writing in the popular venue. His sometimes humorous work tended to bridge the divide between elite and popular culture, even if its themes often remained intellectualized.

There is little humor in James's immense body of fiction and criticism, but like Twain's writing James's emphasized the common person's daily struggle for honesty, even nobility. Intricate and inventive as his narrative structures are, his novels and novellas take as their deeply embedded center such basic human issues as the meaning of friendship, if not love; the source of knowledge, if not truth; the achievement of true living.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, American writers were faced with a plethora of serious issues�race and class inequality; challenges to morality and religion; interrogations of nationalism; and the continuing problem of how one might achieve a truly American art in the face of complicated, and complicating, diversity. Twain's answer was to leave the beautifully detailed character for increasing abstraction; James's was to leave America to live in England so that he might observe his country from abroad and escape the pain he found in the United States.

The tarnish of the long-held American dream, based as it was on the promise of class equality and the efficacy of hard work, became the subject of a number of realistic U.S. writings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925); works by Stephen Crane and Frank Norris; Sinclair Lewis's various treatments of characters with disappointing moral fiber; Gertrude Stein's pitying presentation of the Three Lives of Anna and Lena, German maids, and the mulatto Melanctha (1909); as well as the fiction of such other female writers as Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Sarah Orne Jewett (said to be "local colorists" for no reason other than the fact that their characters lived in recognizable parts of the country) changed the way fiction was both written and read. With the end of the frontier and the threatening political landscape in Europe, writers found few escape routes out of American culture: their job became to limn what they saw before them.

World War I brought an end to the burgeoning sense of American promise. Shut down irrevocably by the machinations of other cultures, the idealized American community of Wharton's old New York, or Twain's Mississippi River, or Willa Cather's Nebraska shifts from the real to the nostalgic.

Much of twentieth-century American literature was a postwar phenomenon�whether the war was located in the world, in Korea, or in Vietnam. Critically, much of the century has been described as modernist or, later, postmodernist. Some of America's most important literature was published between 1910 and 1945, the usual parameters of modernism�the best work of William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, Langston Hughes, Anzia Yezierska, Ellen Glasgow, Wallace Stevens, Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, and Cather, Stein, and Wharton appeared then. Though later critical opinion may denigrate the period for its elitist subjects and self-conscious stylistic effects, modernist writing was amazingly varied.

It could be said that modernism was an attitude more than a historical period. In the search for stability, which resulted from the devastation of belief after scientism, a vacuum intensified by the cataclysmic world war, writers placed dedication to craft before overt religious belief. The role of American literature became less the traditional one of confirming social vision than of questioning it. The shape of texts changed to reflect their purpose: instead of predictable structures, modern writing was chaotic, its structures both ironic and whimsical. Form helped to fill the absence of an agreed-on philosophical system.

The dramatic shift in intention between the so-called high modernists, many of them expatriated from the United States, and what came to be called proletarian writers of the 1930s Depression years confused literary observers. Responding to the sometimes desperate needs of the poor, some writing from the 1930s abandoned the experimentalism of the moderns�and also that pervasive American theme, the development of the individual. More focus fell on the ways communities might help a struggling individual; and that focus was often presented in a readable text, far from the "difficult" poems and stories that had characterized some of modernism.

The modernist aesthetic was to waken readers to new insights through stylistic innovation; by the 1930s the human subject matter of loss was itself sufficient. Typeface would not change the sorrow. As with all good writers, American artists of the 1930s used what was before them with skill and seriousness of purpose and created essential literature that is still in the process of being discovered. A lingering modernist irony is that the writing of this decade�much of it done by a lower economic class, by racial minorities, by migrants, and by women�has been seen as so different from privileged high modernism that few people have bothered to read it.

The newer writing is, the stranger it appears to readers. In the large category of American postmodernism, beginning with John Barth, Joan Didion, Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Vladimir Nabokov and extending through Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and a host of other expert writers, there is a continuing theme of the search for American identity. There is another presence of themes about gender struggle, sexual individuality, religious interrogation, commercialism, and an interest in national identity that spans cyberspace, the realms of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and what was previously considered science fantasy. While one may doubt that the new American language will ever be hypertext, the pervasive American self-consciousness seems to underlie the various narratives that all presume to be crucial parts of Americans' current national representations.