Inventing an American Literature: What the First Novelists Did

The idea

The generation after the Revolution faced a practical problem: a country with a politics of its own and no literature to match, competing in its own bookshops against free British novels, and unsure whether an American book should sound different from an English one at all. What they built was an answer by relocation rather than by invention. Irving took German folklore, Walter Scott's advice and the eighteenth-century periodical essay, and set them in the Hudson Valley under a comic persona, producing in The Sketch Book of eighteen twenty the first American book to win an international audience. His two famous tales show the method exactly: "Rip Van Winkle" sleeps a man through the Revolution so that a village's changed signboard can carry the whole political transformation, and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" offers a headless horseman and a rival with a pumpkin and refuses to choose between them. Cooper took Scott's historical romance and gave it a forest, a war and a frontiersman who is at once a natural aristocrat and a man who cannot live in a town. Natty Bumppo becomes the first American hero and the ancestor of a long line, and the Leatherstocking novels make the vanishing wilderness a subject while treating its vanishing as fate, which is a romance about removal rather than a record of it. Bryant made blank verse carry an American landscape and a consolation drawn from nature rather than scripture. Longfellow, the best-known poet of his day, put legends into European meters and supplied a past to recite. Underneath all of it ran a trade in which pirated Scott and Dickens outsold everyone, which is as much a part of why this literature looks as it does as any writer's intention.