This Week in Literary History: America Turns 250

This archetypal appeared successful Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter—sign up here.

This week, the United States of America turns 250. It’s a milestone that brings mixed feelings astatine best, considering the caller absorption of the country, but since this is simply a file astir literate history, it’s arsenic bully a crushed arsenic immoderate to deliberation astir the past of American Literature.

But what is American Literature? Does it person immoderate individuality different than the literal citizenship of its authors? How does it bespeak and refract the country? What—and who—is it for?

Here are a fewer ideas and answers from the integer pages of Lit Hub:

A abbreviated past of short fabrication by American women • Is the first-person narrator a uniquely American idea? • What the novels of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison reveal astir the psyche of America • How Lewis and Clark invented the Western • Is Minneapolis the most literate metropolis successful America? • How Library of America helped signifier the modern American literate canon • How Gravity’s Rainbow embodied America’s post-war fears • Toni Morrison connected what Flannery O’Connor’s abbreviated fabrication reveals astir contention successful America • On the biographical underpinnings of American classical Portnoy’s Complaint • Who is the existent patron saint of American realism: Lucie Berlin oregon Raymond Carver? • Eleanor Lanahan connected the bequest of her grandfather’s novel, ahem, The Great Gatsby • Why the “Great American Novel” is inactive worthy pursuing • Sarah Domet connected the search for location successful American fiction • How America reacted to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings • On Marianne Moore, unexpected personage writer of midcentury America • How the past of American lit is the past of its libraries • Sara Baume contemplates America done pattern • Viet Thanh Nguyen connected why American lit is the lit of empire • What bash Americans truly privation to read? • Quintessential American fiction, according to the remainder of the world.