Puritanism

• The Puritans arrived in the New World in the early 17th century. Puritans were dour, hard-working and deeply religious people who sailed across the Atlantic to practice their faith in peace. They believed that writing should serve a practical function and disdained literature written for amusement or entertainment. Accordingly, many of the most prominent literary works of the period discussed natural or historical circumstances -- such as the works of Cotton Mather -- or stemmed from flat-out sermons -- such as Jonathan Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
  
  

Enlightenment

• The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, took place in the second half of the 18th century. It saw prominent works all over the world and found fertile ground in America as well. Enlightened literature espoused the values of reason and intellect and in man's capacity to progress towards an idealistic future. Many of its most prominent writers later became the founding fathers of the United States, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. They wrote philosophical and political treatises which included ideas that they later incorporated into the United States government.
  
  

Romanticism

• The rise of the Romantic Movement in the early 19th century included the first formal incorporation of American literature. Independent from England, the United States sought out a national identity of its own; writers and authors contributed by exploring ideas of naturalism, contemporary political issues and stories heavy with religious symbolism. Authors of the time included Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper.
  
  

The Civil War

• In some ways, the American Civil War constituted the first real division between Romanticism and Modernism. The horrors of mass bloodshed, the creation of industrialized war machines such as Gatling guns and the eventual triumph of the industrial North over the agrarian South signaled a shift away from Romantic idealism and towards the populist "common experiences" of Modern writings. American authors participated in that shift, propelled by their predecessors and armed with a distinctively American voice.