Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY226 UNIT 2AMERICAN ROMANTICISM LITERARYHISTORY The First American Short Stories A S THE AMERICAN NOVELIST and critic Henry James observed, “It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” At the beginning of the 1800s, the United States was still a very young country. American writers of the time were painfully conscious of the lack of a native literary tradition. This was particularly true in the area of fiction. Dominated by Puritanism, early American culture had no place for made-up stories created largely for entertainment. This attitude toward fiction lingered for a long time. It was not until the period of American Romanticism that Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe laid the foundations of the American short story. In the process, they created literary forms and ideas about how to write short stories that remain important today. “It has been a matter of marvel, to my European readers, that a man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable English.”—Washington Irving Literary Pioneers Irving, the first American writer to become famousoutside his own country, transplanted traditional European narratives and gave them American settings. For example, he based his story “Rip Van Winkle” on old legends about people captured by fairies. Hawthorne used both European material and the histories and legends of Puritan New England as the basis for his fiction. Poe helped develop the new American literary magazines (to which he contributed as both writer and editor) into mass-circulation marketplaces for short stories. More importantly, he was a true innovator who pioneered new literary forms—detective stories and science fiction.Detective Stories and Science Fiction Tales of robbery and murder had always existed. Poe’s brilliant innovation was to combine such stories with the use of reason in the investigation of crime. This new investigative approach had not existed until the appearance of the first professional police forces in the early 1800s. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe established many of the basic conventions that mystery writers have followed ever since: • the brilliant, eccentric detective • his less-gifted partner, who is an admiring foil • the blundering official police force • the “impossible crime” taking place in a locked room Poe also has a claim to be the “father of science fiction.” In some of his stories, such as “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” he created Romantic tales of terror with an emphasis on factual detail that anticipated later science fiction. Poe so convincingy presented a hoax about a transatlantic balloon flight in one of his short stories that it was widely believed to have actually taken place.
