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This week, the United States turns 250 years old. It’s a milestone that brings mixed emotions given the recent direction of the country, but since this is a column about literary history, it’s a good reason to think about the history of American literature.
But what Is American literature? Does it have any identity apart from the literal citizenship of its authors? How does it reflect and refract the country? What is it and who is it for?
Here are some ideas and answers from Lit Hub’s digital pages:
A Brief History of Short Fiction by American Women • Is the first-person narrator a uniquely American idea? • What the novels of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison tell us about the soul of America • How Lewis and Clark invented the West • Is Minneapolis the most literate city in America? • How the Library of America helped shape the modern American literary canon • How gravity’s rainbow The fears of postwar America were embodied • Toni Morrison explains what Flannery O’Connor’s short story tells us about race in America • On the biographical foundations of an American classic Portnoy’s complaint • Who is the real patron saint of American realism: Lucy Berlin or Raymond Carver? • Eleanor Lanahan on the legacy of her grandfather’s novel Ego, the great Gatsby • Why the “Great American Novel” is still worth pursuing • Sarah Dommett on finding a home in American fiction • How America responded to Maya Angelou’s novels I know why the caged bird sings • On Marianne Moore, mid-century America’s unlikely celebrity poet • How the history of American literature is the history of its libraries • Sarah Baum considers America through patterns • Vietnam Thanh Nguyen on why American literature is the literature of empire • What do Americans really want to read? • The best of American fiction as seen by the rest of the world.
