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Walt Whitman Contribution To American Literature

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INTRODUCTION American Literature is the literature written by American authors based on their own country’s historical, cultural, social, economic and political situations. American Literature has a number of famous writers who have written works in all the genres like poetry, prose, fiction and drama. Some of the famous writers are Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, Thomas Pynchon etc. In the development of American Literature, the American Novel has played a very important role to establish the unique nature of American thought and style. The contribution that this literature has made to the literary canon has been so great, that even though America was once historically a colony of England, it has showcased itself to be a powerful influence on the literary world, by itself with …show more content…

The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald capture the mood of the 1920s, while Hemingway became famous for his war stories such as The Sun Also Rises (date) and A Farewell to Arms (date). According to Richard Chase, “The American Novel was born out of cultural contradictions. Its genesis lies in the aesthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation, contradiction, and the cultural differences between the American and the African tradition and disorder. American Literature reached a new height of perfection and depth of meaning in this period.” (source) Critics like Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson were their best spokesmen. Wilson says that Symbolism, Psychoanalysis and Marxism were the three forces operating on the literary mind of this time. Contemporary Fiction combined the three forces and resulted in novels that were personal, critical, socially oriented and radical in thought and idea. Some of the most famous contemporary writers who incorporated these ideas in their novels include Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo

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