AMERICAN AMERICAN LITERATURELITERATURE

Revolutionary period• Revolution started in 1773 with Boston Tea Party• First autors were scientists, politicins, philosophers so

literature had political character• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)-scientist and journalist,

work: Autobiography• Thomas Pain (1737-1809) work: Common sence

Revolutionary period pt.2Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)• Author of the Declaration of the Indenpendence• Third president of the U.S.A.• Founder of the university in Virginia• Optimistic Aproach to life

First National period

1. Romantic writers

Washington Irving - (1783-1859) work: Rip Van Winkle

Edgar Allan Poe - (1809-1849)

- he mainly wrote short stories inspired by gothic novels:

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Mask of the Red Death

- Famous is his poem The Raven

- Died for alcohol poisoning

James Fenimore Cooper - (1789-1851) Last of the Mohikans

First National Period pt.2

2. Transcendentalis

Inspired by Kant and Coleridge, interested in nature and the limits of human mind

Ralph Waldo Emerson- esseys, speeches

Henry Thereau- philosopher and scientist

First National Period pt.3

3. Novelists

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Inspiredby the Transcendentalists

- work: The Scarlet Letter

Hermann Melville – worked on the whale ship

- work: Moby Dick, Typee

4. Poets

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – poet and translator, wrote the epic The Song of Hiawatha

The Critical Realism

1. Novelists

Jack London (1876-1916) journalist, inspired bysocialist ideas

works:Sea Wolf, White Fang

Mark Twain (1835-1910) printer, boater and humourist

Adventures of Tom Sawyer and

Huckleberry Finn

The Critical Realism pt.2

2. Poets

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote 1800 poems which weren‘t published until her death, greatest american poet

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) journalist, the first poet who wrote in the free verse

The 20th century

1. Fiction of the 1920s

[ “the Jazz Age”, the Lost Generation]

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) work: The Great Gatsby

Sinclair Lewis (1865-1951) first American writer who get Nobel prize

Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)Work: Farewell to the Army

The 20th century pt.2

2. II. World War reflection

Joseph Heller (1923-1999)- Served as pilot

works: Catch 22

Closing hour

Norman Mailer (1923-?) Fought in Pacific works: Naked and Death

Marilyn

William Styron (1925-?) work: Sophia's choice

The 20th century pt.3

3. The Depression years

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) Nobel prize winner

works: Of Mice and Man, The Grapes of Wrath

William Faulkner (1901-1963) another Nobel prize winner

works: The Sound And Fury

The 20th century pt.4

4. Poets

Erza Pound (1885-1972) founder of “Imagism”

Thomas Stearns Elliot (1888-1965) Nobel Prize winner

Works: Wasteland

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

The 20th century pt.5

5. Beat Generation

Jazz, Buddhist philosophy and psychotropic drugs

Allen Ginsberg(1926 – 1997) work: poem Howl

Jack Kerouac: (1922-1969) spokesman of Beatniks,

work: On the Road (manifest of the Beat)