AMERICAN LITERATURE. A term ap plied rather loosely to the body of writings in the English language produced in the territory now occupied by the United States. It includes a period extending from 1608, when Captain John Smith's True Relation was published in London, to the present day. Strictly speaking, the works of Smith and of those of his contempo raries who did not make a permanent sojourn in the New World, belong rather to British than to American literature. Again, it is plain that the term literature must be used with consid erable latitude, if it can be made to include the news-letters. bare annals, the topographical treatises, t-he controversial pamphlets, the ser mons and other theological lucubrations that form the bulk_ of the writings produced by the colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen turies. The paucity of the materials at their command has, however, induced American liter ary historiani to give a hospitable reception to almost everything that can be called a book written in the American colonies or about them, whether published in England or at home after Stephen Daye had set up his press at Cambridge, Mass., in 1639. We need not here imitate their grasping; tendencies, yet we may find a few works of importance dating before 1700 that will de mand our attention.
Surprise has sometimes been expressed at the fact that Englishmen, contemporaries of Shake speare and Milton, should, in their new environ ment, have written practically nothing of value. The excuse is usually made for them that they had many more necessary things to do, such as felling the forests and keeping off the Indians. This excuse is certainly applicable, but it may be doubted whether the Puritan or the Cavalier stock that settled America would have been noted for great contributions to English litera ture had they remained in the mother country. The companions of Bradford and Winthrop would have done what writing they did on theological lines; the companions of Captain Smith and the younger sons of royalist country gentlemen would have written little more than they did in Vir ginia. This is but to say that there is slight reason to express surprise that the colonial lit erature of the seventeenth century is chiefly val uable to the historian and the antiquarian. The
early colonists wrote for utilitarian purposes. The Virginians wrote to convey information to their friends at home and to encourage emigration; the Puritans wrote for these reasons and also to defend and expound their theology and to train up the new generations in the ways of the old. For literary art in itself, or indeed for any art, they had little care; but when, as not infre quently happened, the men who wrote were in teresting or even great in their private or pub lic capacities, they managed to impart some of their own finer qualities to their writings, which may not exactly live, but are, at least, worthy of remembrance if not of perusal by the reader in terested in the history of his country.
The portion of this early literature produced by the Southern and Middle colonies is com paratively meagre. Captain Smith's works, which culminate in the composite General His tory of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles (1624), are quaint and crude but full of their adventurous and magniloquent author's en ergy. William Strachey's account of the famous wreck of Sir Thomas Gates (1610) may possibly, some think probably, have given Shakespeare hints for his description of the storm in The Tempest. Nothing so interesting was in all prob ability produced in Virginia until 1649, when a certain Colonel Norwood narrated to his relative, Sir William Berkeley, the adventures that had befallen him during and after his shipwreck. The mime picturesque Governor Berkeley is one of the protagonists in the next Virginian tract of impor tanee—the so-called Burwell Papers., deseriptive of Bacon's Rebellion (1676). Only two interest ing books are credited to Maryland during this century, John Hammond's Leah and Rachel ( 1656 ) and George Alsop's quaint Character of the Province of Maryland (1666). The Carolinas were settled too late to produce anything of consequence. The same thing is true of the mid dle colonies, although Daniel Denton's Brief De scription of New York (1670) is not uninterest ing. and Gabriel Thomas's Account of Pennsyl vania and New Jersey (1698) does not lack sprightliness.