Arts and Culture American literature
Most very early American literature is European forms and styles transferred to new locales. For example, the tales of Washington Irving (1783-1859), notably "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", seem comfortably European despite their New World settings.
Perhaps the first American writer to produce boldly new fiction and poetry was Edgar Allan Poe (1809- 1849).
In 1835, Poe began writing short stories - including "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" - that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy
Meanwhile, in 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) collected some of his stories as "Twice-Told Tales", a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length "romances," quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his
native New England. His masterpiece, "The Scarlet Letter", is the stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery.
Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819-1891), who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic novels. In "Moby Dick", an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements.
Mark Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens, 1835- 1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast - in the border state of Missouri. His regional masterpieces were the memoir Life on the Mississippi and the novel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Twain's style - influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently funny - changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents.
Henry James (1843-1916) confronted the Old World-New World dilemma by writing directly about it. Although born in New York City, he spent most of his adult years in England. Many of his novels centre on Americans who live in or travel to Europe. With its intricate, highly qualified sentences and dissection of emotional nuance, James's fiction can be very difficult at times.
The stories and novels of E Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in "The Great Gatsby", is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the senseless carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized courage under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women.
"The Sun Also Rises", "The Old Man and the Sea" and "A Farewell to Arms" are generally considered Hemingway's best novels; in 1954 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Robert Ludlum (1927- 2001) was the author of 29 spy fiction novels and the best-selling author of the 1980s. There have been more than 210 million of his book printed, and they have been translated into 32 languages. His books mainly feature a hero up against tremendous odds, and have a lot of violence and action. Most of his books are set in the time of the Cold War, and some feature real characters with fiction built around them, such as the terrorist Carlos "The Jackal" in "The Bourne Identity".
Stephen King (born 1947) is a prolific American author best known for his horror novels. King's books have been extremely popular, and are among the top-selling books ever, fiction or non-fiction. King's stories often involve an unremarkable character middle-class families, children, and often writers being submerged into increasingly horrifying circumstances. He also produced more typical literary work, including the The Body, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.
Dan Brown (born in 1964 in New Hampshire) is an American author of detective thrillers. His novels to date are: Digital Fortress (1998), Angels and Demons (2000), Deception Point (2001) and The Da Vinci Code (2003)
He is the best-selling American author today, but very heavily criticised for his interpretation of Roman Catholic dogma and innovative views on history.
He has become so popular that one website on Brown begins with the words "Approximately three people still haven't read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code."