what is the literature of the United States?
Is geopolitical power accompanied by cultural visibility? Sometimes it is, sometimes not. China would be an example of a country that influences our lives by geopolitics and global economy without making us read any of its books. The United States, as I believe, used to be popular as a source of aestetic inspiration only locally and episodically, in specific moments and places such as Poland at the beginning of the 1990s. For the rest, we don't read so many new American books at all, and I believe the American impact is to be felt more in the domain of literary studies than original literature. But here it is, the American literature, crucible of peoples, settlements, diasporas. It is a literature of reinvention, of struggle, of ambition, and contradiction—a reflection of a country built on ideals yet marked by conflict.The story begins long before the United States existed as a nation. Indigenous oral traditions, rich with mythology, history, and spiritual teachings, formed the first literary expressions of the land. These stories—of trickster figures like Coyote and Raven, of creation myths and journeys of survival—shaped the understanding of the natural world and humanity’s place within it. For a long time, the Native Americans could barely make their oral legacies audible. Their voice appeared in print almost at the time of the American revolution: in 1771 the first work by a Native American in English, A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, by Samson Occom, from the Mohegan tribe. But this was only an isolated text, and the country was shaped, of course, by the political writings of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Alexander Hamilton. Though colonization sought to silence the Native voices, they endured and later found written form in the works of modern Native writers like Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Joy Harjo.
With the arrival of European settlers, a new kind of writing took hold—one of exploration, survival, and religious devotion. The Puritans, seeking to build a "city upon a hill," left behind a literary legacy of sermons, journals, and poetry, most famously in the works of Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards. The frontier, meanwhile, inspired adventure narratives and captivity tales, reflecting both fear and fascination with the unknown wilderness. Then came the Revolutionary period, and with it, a literature of ideas. The voices of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson did more than document the birth of a nation—they shaped its very identity. The Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, and the essays of the time laid the foundation for an American literary tradition rooted in democracy, individualism, and dissent.
But it was in the 19th century that American literature truly found its soul. It gained momentum quite quickly, and among its first writers there are many that make part of the global canon, like Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden. I would say that at the brink of the 19th and the 20th century, American literature was more eminent than it is today, illustrated by such names as Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and the rest of them. But let's break it down a little bit. The country’s first great literary movement, American Romanticism, embraced themes of nature, self-reliance, and the pursuit of truth. Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau championed transcendentalism, urging Americans to look inward for wisdom. At the same time, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville explored the darker sides of the human condition, penning classic works such as The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick.
As the nation expanded westward, so did its stories. Mark Twain, with his sharp wit and deep humanity, captured the spirit of the Mississippi River and the contradictions of American life in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Meanwhile, poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson redefined American poetry—Whitman with his bold, free-spirited verse in Leaves of Grass, and Dickinson with her quiet, enigmatic brilliance.
Then came the Civil War, a rupture that reshaped both the country and its literature. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe used the power of words to expose the horrors of slavery, while Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address became a masterpiece of rhetoric. In the aftermath, the Realist movement emerged, with writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton painting precise portraits of American society, and Stephen Crane capturing the harsh realities of war and survival.
The 20th century brought modernism, jazz, rebellion. The transatlantic modernist wave that followed the ww1 was illustrated by many American names, such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Even the Depression era had valuable literary outcomes, such as the novels of John Steinbeck. In the wake of World War I, the Lost Generation of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein wrote of disillusionment and excess, while William Faulkner delved into the haunted landscapes of the American South. The Harlem Renaissance exploded with the voices of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay, bringing Black experience and culture to the forefront of American letters.
Then came the great upheavals of the mid-century—World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War—and literature responded with power and urgency. John Steinbeck chronicled the struggles of the working class, Richard Wright and James Baldwin confronted race and identity, and Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg gave voice to a new kind of poetic rebellion.
By the late 20th and early 21st century, American literature had become more fragmented, more diverse, more experimental. Toni Morrison’s lyrical novels rewrote history from a Black perspective, while Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon captured the paranoia and absurdity of the modern world. Meanwhile, writers like Sandra Cisneros, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Viet Thanh Nguyen told stories of immigration, displacement, and the changing face of America. Today, American literature is as vast and varied as the country itself. It is found not only in novels and poetry but in rap lyrics, spoken word performances, and digital storytelling. It continues to wrestle with the American dream and its contradictions, with freedom and oppression, with memory and reinvention.
With the arrival of European settlers, a new kind of writing took hold—one of exploration, survival, and religious devotion. The Puritans, seeking to build a "city upon a hill," left behind a literary legacy of sermons, journals, and poetry, most famously in the works of Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards. The frontier, meanwhile, inspired adventure narratives and captivity tales, reflecting both fear and fascination with the unknown wilderness. Then came the Revolutionary period, and with it, a literature of ideas. The voices of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson did more than document the birth of a nation—they shaped its very identity. The Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, and the essays of the time laid the foundation for an American literary tradition rooted in democracy, individualism, and dissent.
But it was in the 19th century that American literature truly found its soul. It gained momentum quite quickly, and among its first writers there are many that make part of the global canon, like Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden. I would say that at the brink of the 19th and the 20th century, American literature was more eminent than it is today, illustrated by such names as Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and the rest of them. But let's break it down a little bit. The country’s first great literary movement, American Romanticism, embraced themes of nature, self-reliance, and the pursuit of truth. Writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau championed transcendentalism, urging Americans to look inward for wisdom. At the same time, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville explored the darker sides of the human condition, penning classic works such as The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick.
As the nation expanded westward, so did its stories. Mark Twain, with his sharp wit and deep humanity, captured the spirit of the Mississippi River and the contradictions of American life in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Meanwhile, poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson redefined American poetry—Whitman with his bold, free-spirited verse in Leaves of Grass, and Dickinson with her quiet, enigmatic brilliance.
Then came the Civil War, a rupture that reshaped both the country and its literature. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe used the power of words to expose the horrors of slavery, while Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address became a masterpiece of rhetoric. In the aftermath, the Realist movement emerged, with writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton painting precise portraits of American society, and Stephen Crane capturing the harsh realities of war and survival.
The 20th century brought modernism, jazz, rebellion. The transatlantic modernist wave that followed the ww1 was illustrated by many American names, such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Even the Depression era had valuable literary outcomes, such as the novels of John Steinbeck. In the wake of World War I, the Lost Generation of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein wrote of disillusionment and excess, while William Faulkner delved into the haunted landscapes of the American South. The Harlem Renaissance exploded with the voices of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay, bringing Black experience and culture to the forefront of American letters.
Then came the great upheavals of the mid-century—World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War—and literature responded with power and urgency. John Steinbeck chronicled the struggles of the working class, Richard Wright and James Baldwin confronted race and identity, and Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg gave voice to a new kind of poetic rebellion.
By the late 20th and early 21st century, American literature had become more fragmented, more diverse, more experimental. Toni Morrison’s lyrical novels rewrote history from a Black perspective, while Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon captured the paranoia and absurdity of the modern world. Meanwhile, writers like Sandra Cisneros, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Viet Thanh Nguyen told stories of immigration, displacement, and the changing face of America. Today, American literature is as vast and varied as the country itself. It is found not only in novels and poetry but in rap lyrics, spoken word performances, and digital storytelling. It continues to wrestle with the American dream and its contradictions, with freedom and oppression, with memory and reinvention.
I have readWilliam Wharton, Birdy (1978)
Ursula K. Le Guin, Planet of Exile (1966), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974) William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird (1965) Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958) William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948) Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851) |
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I have written... nothing ...
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eternal boyhoods
(at a distance of several decades, thousands of kilometres from the Mountain)
I had mixed feelings while reading that old American classic, Kerouac's Dharma Bums. The book, originally published in the late 1950s, had an abundant descendants, even in such places, distant in space and time, as the early 1990's Poland. I found the spiritual sons of Kerouac, those useless Polish boys, choking with newly acquired liberty after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, while we, little females, were supposed to ogarniać (an umbrella verb, resuming activities aiming at reasoned control of all aspects of the reality, domestic chores, providing food and clothing in an impoverished country, cleaning, washing, sewing and making repairs, turning habitable the rabbit cages where we were supposed to live, looking after minors, feeding them and cleaning their anuses). The eternal boyhood that Kerouac provided with a Buddhist bible of its own is still alive, still with us, long after all Dharma vaporised, and we, the present day women of Poland are still dragging its dead weight. It explains my allergic reaction. I even wondered if the aim of the novel wasn't actually critical; some of the scenes are indeed grotesque by the contrast of the sublime and the crass reality the heroes live like in a phantasmagorical dream. But it was probably too early for this. Most probably, Karouac sincerely meant and believed all those stupid things he wrote.
Well, neither sex nor abuse of alcohol are not completely unknown in the history of Buddhism (I write about it myself on this page, in the section dedicated to Bhutan). But it is very clear that this naïve, American Buddhism is as incompetent as it is terribly mislead. Of course, the heroes, under one mountain trip and another party, are not in the least on the right path toward the Illumination, and very far from discovering their True Nature of Buddha. They are simply cheating themselves, in the darkness of American maya, more confusing than at any other geographical location.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Kerouac created something new and lasting, and the beauty of many of his pages is striking. He contributed to a cultural movement that, at a distance of several decades and many thousand kilometres, brought my own early experience of Buddhism, lived in a zazen session in Falenica, in the suburbs of Warsaw. But I didn't read this book at the time. Perhaps if I had read it, I wouldn't sit in that zazen session. Because it was not a part of my eternal girlhood. To the contrary.
Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums, read in a Polish translation: Włóczędzy Dharmy, trans. Marek Obarski, Warszawa, Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 1994.
Kraków, 13.09.2021.
Well, neither sex nor abuse of alcohol are not completely unknown in the history of Buddhism (I write about it myself on this page, in the section dedicated to Bhutan). But it is very clear that this naïve, American Buddhism is as incompetent as it is terribly mislead. Of course, the heroes, under one mountain trip and another party, are not in the least on the right path toward the Illumination, and very far from discovering their True Nature of Buddha. They are simply cheating themselves, in the darkness of American maya, more confusing than at any other geographical location.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Kerouac created something new and lasting, and the beauty of many of his pages is striking. He contributed to a cultural movement that, at a distance of several decades and many thousand kilometres, brought my own early experience of Buddhism, lived in a zazen session in Falenica, in the suburbs of Warsaw. But I didn't read this book at the time. Perhaps if I had read it, I wouldn't sit in that zazen session. Because it was not a part of my eternal girlhood. To the contrary.
Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums, read in a Polish translation: Włóczędzy Dharmy, trans. Marek Obarski, Warszawa, Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 1994.
Kraków, 13.09.2021.
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Borderlands/La Frontera
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