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Columbus’s voyage to the Americas began the exploitation of Native populations by European imperial powers, but we need not think of the intellectual exchange between the two hemispheres as being entirely in one direction.

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The Native cultures Columbus found in the New World displayed a huge variety of languages, social customs, and creative expressions, with a common practice of oral literature without parallel east of the Atlantic. Compared to the three dozen languages, common religion and printed alphabet, and stable boundaries of the European nation-states, the Native peoples were much more diverse.

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During the eighteenth century, the religious, intellectual, and economic horizons of the thirteen English colonies expanded, challenging the dominance of Puritan culture with Enlightenment thought and uniting the different regions behind common national interests. The death of the minister and author Cotton Mather in 1728 symbolizes the waning influence of Puritan theocentrism.

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During the 1820s, writers and critics called for nationalistic literature to reflect the new sense of cultural independence from Britain. After Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans to end the War of 1812, a heroic national myth grew up around him that asserted the strength and optimism of the American character and suggested a hopeful trajectory for national literature that concentrated on ordinary people.

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The crisis point for the interwar period occurred during the 1930s, when international cultural, economic, and political tensions resulted in the Great Depression and World War II. In Germany, Italy, and Spain fascist dictators rose to power and began to threaten their neighbors with aggressive rhetoric, military rearmament, and anti-Semitic genocide. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal offered a pragmatic solution to the disastrous failure of free-market capitalism.

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The literature of this period appears in the context of the dramatic diversification of American experience, both ethnic and regional, and the small but insistent movement among authors to combat the social inequities arising from too-rapid growth. Immigration from Europe and Asia resulted in a newly heterogeneous American population, now no longer mainly of New England descent, and now more diverse in terms of class and ethnic backgrounds.