A LITERATURE YOUNGER THAN PRINTING

Evening Star, Issue 23681, 14 September 1940, Page 4

A LITERATURE YOUNGER THAN PRINTING

American literature is the only important literature in the world which; is younger than the art of printingOther literatures have begun with legends and poetry, oral and fluid to the play of many imaginations before they were written down. In America prose came firstj in reports of voyages to the New World, in descriptions of the continent which had been found beyond the dangerous Atlantic, in narratives of exploration, conquest, and settlement. This prose, sent back to Europe, was printed, and may still be read, unlike the news of the earliest ventures to Greece or Rome, to Gaul or Spain, to Britain or Germany or Russia. .... American literature has never quite ceased being news from the New World to the Old. The writers of the seventeenth century wrote mostly for Europe. The writers of the twentieth century write mostly for America. But in both centuries, as in those between, there has been always the feeling, if not the thought, that American writers must show how live in America, as if this were in itself an end. ... Throughout the colonial century and a half the writers who now seem most interesting were the men and women who, with this or that degree of favour, simply described the kinds of life that Americans led, the kinds of human beings that Americans were. The forms of art were hardly practised at all by colonial writers. There was no drama, no fiction, little poetry and none of it good, and only the beginnings of Journalism. Oratory itself had to wait for the Revolution to call it into use and excellence. Outside of New England there was, before the Revolution, no literature which had any real merit except that of honest, lively, or naive description or actual or typical circumstances. From ‘ What is American Literature ? ’ by Carl Van Doren.