There is an ongoing debate in the field of literary history about when a distinctly American literature emerged. Some scholars argue that American authors did not gain a voice separate from their British forebears until well into the nineteenth century. According to these critics, the form and voice of literature published in the early American nation was not distinctive enough to merit consideration as "American." In some opinions, an added detriment to anything that might be considered American literature is that nothing produced had literary merit. Books were expensive to produce, and pirating of already produced English works was more profitable for printers than producing new works of fiction by American authors. Only about ninety American works of fiction were printed between 1789 and 1820, and few of these made a profit. No American author was able to make a living from writing until the 1820s, although certainly Susanna Rowson (1762-1824) and Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) tried.
Despite these facts, other scholars make the case for an American literature that emerged in the period of the ratification of the Constitution. These scholars believe that the early American novel, while it may not live up to some hard-to-define literary standards, was very American, reflecting the anxieties of nation building. The American Revolution (1775-1783) led to social, political, and cultural upheaval. Because of this, they argue, the genre of American literature was far from stable because it was reflective of an unstable society. While the form was British, the messages, scattered as they may have been, were American. These early novels grappled with the question of what it meant to be a citizen of the newly formed nation and whether or not independence was worth the disruptions that followed.
These experiments in an American fictional voice took place exclusively in the North. The American South did not engage in the creation of fiction. While southerners certainly helped to shape political discourse, novels and other fictional forms were produced by the pens of northerners. As white southerners tightened their defense of slavery after the American Revolution, they took a lesser part in the creation of an American national identity than the northerners who engaged in the questions of identity in both fiction and nonfiction. In addition, the contribution to American fiction was limited by race. For African Americans in all parts of the new Republic, racism and the concomitant poverty and lack of education of blacks kept them from writing. Although poetry of African American Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) was widely read, only four novels by African Americans were published before the Civil War, and none of these were published until the midnineteenth century.
While American writers did not break away from the literary forms of the British, there were several attempts to create a distinctly American literature. The Connecticut (or Hartford) Wits were among the first group of writers who consciously tried to do that. These men had been born in Connecticut and had attended Yale College. They believed that they could create an American voice and advocate a political cause. The Wits were concerned about the emergence of democratic movements after the war. They wrote poems to honor stability and oppose Jeffersonian democracy. The Wits included John Trumbull (1750—1831), author of two popular satiric poems, M'Fingal (1776-1782) and The Progress of Dulness (1772-1773), and Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), the author of The Conquest of Canaan (1785), an epic poem about the American Revolution. The Wits put themselves in opposition to Philip Freneau (1752-1832), known as the "poet of the American Revolution," who embraced Jeffersonian democracy. Despite his ideological differences with the Wits, Fre-neau also believed in the importance of developing an exclusively American idiom. Although these early writers largely failed in their attempts to break from British forms, their attempts to create something truly American are noteworthy.
One of the first authors to explicitly attempt to define American character was J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813). A French immigrant who was married to a woman from a Loyalist family, Crèvecoeur was unable to choose a side during the American Revolution. After spending time in a British army prison in New York and then sailing to London, Crèvecoeur published the fictional Letters from an American Farmer in 1782. Taking the persona of James, a farmer without extensive schooling, Crèvecoeur asked, "What, then, is the American, this new man?" He answered his question by arguing that the American was indeed new, a mixture of ethnicities and beliefs, rising from a melting pot of European cultures. Crèvecoeur celebrated the American character, one that he believed had left behind the prejudices of Europe and defined itself by hard work and perseverance. However, Crèvecoeur did not leave the picture entirely rosy, but wrote of frontier dwellers who were less advanced than their eastern counterparts and of brutality in the slave system of the American South.
While other authors did not address the question as directly as Crèvecoeur had, the process of definition and differentiation from Britain was apparent in many of the early works of fiction. Much as Crèvecoeur had sought to define the American man as different from the European man, other early American writers sought to justify American independence or define American character. Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was well-known for his political allegories, which helped make the case against Britain during the war. In his best-known piece, The Pretty Story (1774), the colonists appeared as a farmer's sons fighting against mismanagement of their family farm. These political allegories helped set the stage for later American fiction. Early American playwright Royall Tyler (175 7-1826) also worked to distinguish Europe and America. In The Contrast (1787), the first comedy play to be professionally produced on the American stage, Tyler pitted the republican American against the refined European, with the American triumphing in the end.
The fiction of the early American nation reflected the rapid changes brought about by the Revolution and the nation making that followed. The first American novels were about seduction, telling the stories of young women who lost their virtue to conniving men. Novels centered on the seduction of young women highlighted the dangers and upheavals of the new nation. Focused on an English novel, Clarissa (1747-1748), and nervous about the changes in the nation he helped to create, John Adams famously compared democracy to Lovelace, the immoral character who leads to Clarissa's ruin. He argued that democracy would lead to the ruin and death of the new United States, much as Lovelace had ruined Clarissa. While Adams called on an English example written before the creation of the United States, male and female American authors in the early American nation deliberately toyed with these same concerns.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Charles Brockden Brown had begun to publish his Gothic novels in which nothing was settled and the world seemed a very chaotic place. These early novels, like the poems, allegories, plays, and other forms of fiction in early America, were British in form. Yet they all spoke to the question of political unsettledness and the questions raised by the Revolution. Who had power? Who could speak? Had the republican experiment succeeded or failed? Who was an American citizen and what characteristics was that citizen to embrace? All of the early American novels advanced a theory of education, a topic that was much in the political and social discourse. Novelists like Charles Brockden Brown believed that their novels did nothing less than engage in the ongoing cultural dialogue about politics and society.
Despite Brown's defense of the novel, the form had many critics. Politicians and ministers railed against novels. These critics believed, or said they believed, that novel reading would lead to the downfall of the Republic. Critics wrote about these fears in magazines and newspapers. In their prefaces or intraductions, novelists condemned the very form in which they engaged. Novels, in the opinion of the critics, took readers away from the serious matters of citizenship. Instead of reality, readers would be so tied up with fantasy they would be unable to function in the virtuous ways necessary for maintaining the Republic. After all, the United States was new and fragile. Psychologically, novel reading was dangerous for other reasons as well. In the growing field of medicine focused on mental illness, doctors believed that mental health was maintained by control. Men or women who spent too many hours immersed in the fantasy world of novels would more easily lose their control and would be ill-prepared to deal with disappointment or shock. Reading history or essays led to rationality; reading novels led to irrationality.
It is generally agreed that the first American novel is The Power of Sympathy, or the Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth (1789), by William Hill Brown (1765-1793). The main story in The Power of Sympathy is of a doomed, incestuous love. Embedded within the story of Harriot and Harrington, who discover too late that they are brother and sister, was the real-life eighteenth-century story of Fanny Apthorp and her brother-in-law, Perez Morton. Morton had seduced Apthorp, and she became pregnant. In August 1788, Apthorp committed suicide, unwilling to make public accusations against Morton. In his book, Brown thinly disguised Apthorp as Ophelia in a vignette that briefly distracts the reader from the main story line. With such tales, "founded in truth," Brown argued that his novel was a cautionary tale and therefore fit for reading, unlike other, frivolous works of fiction.
Other novels quickly followed The Power of Sympathy. The two best-selling novels in the early American nation were written by women. In Charlotte Temple (1791), by Susanna Rowson, young Charlotte is seduced by Montraville, carried from her native England to America, and then left to her ruin and death. The novel was so popular that it was surpassed in sales only after the mid-nineteenth century, by Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Second only to Charlotte Temple was The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton (1797), by Hannah Webster Foster (17581840). In this story Eliza Wharton chooses the path of coquetry, eschewing the life of virtue she felt would confine her too much. The consequence is death and dishonor, but the novel raised interesting questions about the nature of female roles in the new nation.
Other important writers emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816), a Scottish immigrant and a friend of Philip Freneau, published several dramas based on events in the Revolutionary War. His most important work was a novel, Modern Chivalry, published in four volumes during the years from 1792 to 1815. In the republic of Modern Chivalry, men without qualifications are elected to office by ill-informed voters. In the text Brackenridge praised democracy but also worried about it. In a work written over more than a decade, a reader can see some of Bracken-ridge's own shifting alliances.
The author who came closest to making a living as a writer in the period before 1820 was Charles Brockden Brown, although he was never able to fully support himself with his writing. With his Gothic novels, he emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as one of the most prolific writers of fiction. Brown's first novel, Wieland (1798), is a story of madness. In his madness, Theodore Wieland eventually kills all four of his children, tries to kill his wife, and eventually commits suicide. Brown, engaging in the larger discourse about nationhood, believed this novel would be useful to his readers, particularly with regard to thoughts about "the moral constitution of man." Without checks on liberty, anarchy would reign. He sent his novel to Vice President Thomas Jefferson, perhaps believing that he offered a solution to the problems of the new United States. Brown followed Wieland with Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntly (1799), and Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800).
While all of the published fiction in the early American nation was flawed, these works are reflective of a society born out of war, cut off from its colonial past, and experimenting with new forms of government. With this in mind, these publications can be seen as American publications. The writers adopted familiar forms and tropes but used these to comment on the new society, and in Charles Brock-den Brown's case, to push for change. For the new Republic to function and perhaps thrive, these authors believed, citizens needed to be educated. Female and male authors argued that this was true of women as well as men. And novelists, even those who—like Brackenridge—supported increased democracy, worried about what would happen if democracy was taken too far.
The new United States was far from united. Crime rose in the cities and disorder seemed to reign everywhere people looked. A myth about the American Revolution has developed over the centuries to the point where people now believe almost everyone supported the cause and the consequences. The fiction of the time gives a more accurate picture of the debates, the upheavals, the disagreements, and the fears. While flawed as literature, it is utterly reflective of a time and place otherwise largely lost.