New Literary History of America

Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, Mystery Train, and other books. Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

In snapshots of a few thousand words each, the entries in A New Literary History put on display the exploring, tinkering, and risk-taking that have contributed to the invention of America… A New Literary History of America gives us what amounts to a fractal geometry of American culture. You can focus on any one spot and get a sense of the whole or pull back and watch the larger patterns appear. What you see isn’t the past so much as the present.

• * Introduction [Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors] *1507: The name "America" appears on a map [Toby Lester] *1521, August 13: Mexico in America [Kirsten Silva Gruesz] *1536, July 24: Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca [Ilan Stavans] *1585: "Counterfeited according to the truth" [Michael Gaudio] *1607: Fear and love in the Virginia colony [Adam Goodheart] *1630: A city upon a hill [Elizabeth Winthrop] *1643: A nearer neighbor to the Indians [Ted Widmer] *1666, July 10: Anne Bradstreet [Wai Chee Dimock] *1670: The American jeremiad [Emory Elliott] *1670: The stamp of God's image [Jason D. LaFountain] *1673: The Jesuit relations [Laurent Dubois] *1683: Francis Daniel Pastorius [Alfred L. Brophy] *1692: The Salem witchcraft trials [Susan Castillo] *1693--1694, March 4: Edward Taylor [Werner Sollors] *1700: Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph [David Blight] *1722: Benjamin Franklin, The Silence Dogood Letters [Joyce E. Chaplin] *1740: The Great Awakening [Joanne van der Woude] * Late 1740s; 1814, September 13--14: Two national anthems [John Picker] *1765, December 23: Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur [Leo Damrosch] *1773, September: Phillis Wheatley [Rafia Zafar] *1776: The Declaration of Independence [Frank Kelleter] *1784, June: Charles Willson Peale [Michael Leja] *1787: James Madison, Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention [Mitchell Meltzer] *1787--1790: John Adams, Discourses on Davila [John Diggins] *1791: Philip Freneau and The National Gazette [Jeffrey L. Pasley] *1796: Washington's farewell address [Francois Furstenberg] *1798: Mary Rowlandson and the Alien and Sedition Acts [Nancy Armstrong] *1798: American gothic [Marc Amfreville] *1801, March 4: Jefferson's first inaugural address [Jan Ellen Lewis] *1804, January: The matter of Haiti [Kaiama Glover] *1809: Cupola of the world [Judith Richardson] *1819, February: The Missouri crisis [John Stauffer] *1820, November 27: Landscape with birds [Christoph Irmscher] *1821: Sequoyah, the Cherokee syllabary [Lisa Brooks] *1821, June 30: Junius Brutus Booth [Coppelia Kahn] *1822: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe firefly, and Longfellow's Hiawatha [David Treuer] *1825, November: Thomas Cole and the Hudson River school [Alan Wallach] *1826, July 4: Songs of the republic [Steve Erickson] *1826: Cooper's Leatherstocking tales [Richard Hutson] *1826; 1927: Transnational poetry [Stephen Burt] *1827: Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon [Terryl L. Givens] *1828: David Walker, Appeal, in Four Articles [Tommie Shelby] *1830, May 21: Jump Jim Crow [W.T. Lhamon, Jr.] *1831, March 5: The Cherokee Nation decision [Philip Deloria] *1832, July 10: President Jackson's bank veto [Dan Feller] *1835, January: Democracy in America [Ted Widmer] *1835: William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee [Jeffrey Johnson] *1835: The Sacred Harp [Sean Wilentz] *1836, February 23--March 6: The Alamo and Texas border writing [Norma E. Cantu] *1836, February 28: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. [Kirsten Silva Gruesz] *1837, August 15: Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" [James Conant] *1838, July 15: "The Divinity School Address" [Herwig Friedl] *1838, September 3: The slave narrative [Caille Millner] *1841: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" [Robert Clark] *1846, June: James Russell Lowell's Biglow Papers [Shelley Streeby] *1846, late July: Henry David Thoreau [Jonathan Arac] *1850: The Scarlet Letter [Bharati Mukherjee] *1850, July 19: Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement [Lawrence Buell] *1850, August 5: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville [Clark Blaise] *1851: Moby-Dick [Greil Marcus] *1851: Uncle Tom's Cabin [Beverly Lowry] *1852: Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance and utopian communities [Winfried Fluck] *1852, July 5: Frederick Douglass, "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" [Liam Kennedy] *1854: Maria Cummins and sentimental fiction [Cindy Weinstein] *1855: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [Angus Fletcher] *1858: The Lincoln--Douglas debates [Michael T. Gilmore] *1859: The science of the Indian [Scott Richard Lyons] *1861: Emily Dickinson [Susan Stewart] *1862, December 13: The journeys of Little Women [Shirley Samuels] *1865, March 4: Lincoln's second inaugural address [Ted Widmer] *1865: "Conditions of repose" [Robin Kelsey] *1869, March 4: Carl Schurz [Michael Boyden] *1872, November 5: All men and women are created equal [Laura Wexler] *1875: The Winchester Rifle [Merritt Roe Smith] *1876, January 6: Melville in the dark [Kenneth W. Warren] *1876, March 10: The art of telephony [Avital Ronell] *1878: "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" [Christopher Hookway] *1879: John Muir and nature writing [Scott Slovic] *1881, January 24: Henry James, Portrait of a Lady [Alide Cagidemetrio] *1884: Mark Twain's hairball [Ishmael Reed] *1884, July: The Linotype machine [Lisa Gitelman] *1884, November: The Southwest imagined [Leah Dilworth] *1885: The problem of error [James Conant] *1885, July: Limits to violence [James Dawes] *1885, October: Writing New Orleans [Andrei Codrescu] *1888: The introduction of motion pictures [Jonathan Lethem] *1889, August 28: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [Yael Schacher] *1893: Chief Simon Pokagon and Native American literature [David Treuer] *1895: Ida B. Wells, A Red Record [Jacqueline Goldsby] *1896: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life [Judith Jackson Fossett] *1896, September 6: Queen Lili'uokalani [Rob Wilson] *1897, Memorial Day: The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument [Richard Powers] *1898, June 22: Literature and imperialism [Amy Kaplan] *1899; 1924: McTeague and Greed [Gilberto Perez] *1900: Henry Adams [T.J. Jackson Lears] *1900: The Wizard of Oz [Gerald Early] *1900; 1905: Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth [Farah Jasmine Griffin] *1901: Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition [John Edgar Wideman] *1901; 1903: The problem of the color line [Arnold Rampersad] *1903, May 5: "The real American has not yet arrived" [Aviva Taubenfeld] *1903: The invention of the blues [Luc Sante] *1903: One sees what one sees [Daniel Albright] *1904, August 30: Henry James in America [Ross Posnock] *1905, October 15: Little Nemo in Slumberland [Kerry Roeder] *1906, April 9: The Azusa Street revival [RJ Smith] *1906, April 18, 5:14 a.m.: The San Francisco Earthquake [Kathleen Moran] *1911: "Alexander's Ragtime Band" [Philip Furia] *1912, April 15: Lifeboats cut adrift [Alan Ackerman] *1912: The lure of impossible things [Heather Love] *1912: Tarzan begins his reign [Gerald Early] *1913: A modernist moment [Bonnie Costello] *1915: D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation [Richard Schickel] *1915: Robert Frost [Christian Wiman] *1917: The philosopher and the millionaire [Richard J. Bernstein] *1920, August 10: Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" [Daphne A. Brooks] *1921: Jean Toomer [Elizabeth Alexander] *1922: T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence [Anita Patterson] *1923, October: Chaplinesque [David Thomson] *1924: F.O. Matthiessen meets Russell Cheney [Robert Polito] *1924, May 26: The Johnson--Reed Act and ethnic literature [Yael Schacher] *1925: The Great Gatsby [Lan Tran] *1925, June: Sinclair Lewis [Jeffrey Ferguson] *1925, July: The Scopes trial [Michael Kazin] *1925, August 16: Dorothy Parker [Catherine Keyser] *1926: Fire!! [Carla Kaplan] *1926: Hardboiled [Walter Mosley] *1926: The Book-of-the-Month Club [Joan Shelley Rubin] *1927: Carl Sandburg and The American Songbag [Paul Muldoon] *1927, May 16: "Free to develop their faculties" [Jeffrey Rosen] *1928, April 8, Easter Sunday: Dilsey Gibson goes to church [Werner Sollors] *1928, Summer: John Dos Passos [Phoebe Kosman] *1928, November 18: The mouse that whistled [Karal Ann Marling] *1930: "You're swell!" [Robert Gottlieb] *1930, March: The Silent Enemy [Micah Treuer] *1930, October: Grant Wood's American Gothic [Sarah Vowell] *1931, March 19: Nevada legalizes gambling [David Thomson] *1932: Edmund Wilson, The American Jitters [Anthony Grafton] *1932: Arthur Miller [Andrea Most] *1932, April or May: The River Rouge plant and industrial beauty [John M. Staudenmaier, S.J.] *1932, Christmas: Ned Cobb [Robert Cantwell] *1933: Baby Face is censored [Stephanie Zacharek] *1933, March: FDR's first Fireside Chat [Paula Rabinowitz] *1934, September: Robert Penn Warren [Howell Raines] *1935: The Popular Front [Angela Miller] *1935: The skyscraper [Sarah Whiting] *1935, June 10: Alcoholics Anonymous [Michael Tolkin] *1935, October 10: Porgy and Bess [John Rockwell] *1936: Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom! [Carolyn Porter] *1936, July 5: Two days in Harlem [Adam Bradley] *1936, November 23: Life begins [Michael Lesy] *1938: Superman [Douglas Wolk] *1938, May: Jelly Roll Morton speaks [Marybeth Hamilton] *1939: Billie Holiday, "Strange Fruit" Robert O'Meally *1939; 1981: Up from invisibility [Josef Jarab] *1940: "No way like the American way" [Erika Doss] *1940--1944: Preston Sturges [Douglas McGrath] *1941: An insolent style [Carrie Tirado Bramen] *1941: Citizen Kane [Joseph McBride] *1941: The word "multicultural" [Werner Sollors] *1943: Hemingway's paradise, Hemingway's prose [Keith Taylor] *1944: The second Bill of Rights [Cass R. Sunstein] *1945, February: Bebop [Ingrid Monson] *1945, April 11: Thomas Pynchon and modern war [Glenda Carpio] *1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m.: The atom bomb [Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi] *1946, December 5: Integrating the military [Gerald Early] *1947, December 3: Tennessee Williams [Camille Paglia] *1948: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics [David A. Mindell] *1948: Saul Bellow [Ruth Wisse] *1949--1950: "The Birth of the Cool" [Ted Gioia] *1950, November 28: "Damned busy painting" [T.J. Clark] *1951: A poet among painters [Mark Ford] *1951: The Catcher in the Rye [Gish Jen] *1951: James Jones, From Here to Eternity [Lindsay Waters] *1951: A soft voice [M. Lynn Weiss] *1952, April 12: Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood [Michael Ventura] *1952, June 10: C.L.R. James [Donald E. Pease] *1953, January 1: The song in country music [Dave Hickey] *1954: Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems [Helen Vendler] *1955, August 11: "The self-respect of my people" [Monica L. Miller] *1955, September 21: A.J. Liebling and the Marciano--Moore fight [Carlo Rotella] *1955, October 7: A generation in miniature [Richard Candida Smith] *1955, December: Nabokov's Lolita [Stephen Schiff] *1956, April 16: "Roll Over Beethoven" [James Miller] *1957: Dr. Seuss [Philip Nel] *1959: "Nobody's perfect" [William J. Mann] *1960: Psycho [William Beard] *1960, January: More than a game [Michael MacCambridge] *1961, January 20: JFK's inaugural address and Catch-22 [Charles Taylor] *1961, July 2: The author as advertisement [David Thomson] *1962: Bob Dylan writes "Song to Woody" [Joshua Clover] *1962: "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" [Howard Hampton] *1963, April: "Letter from Birmingham Jail" [George Hutchinson] *1964: Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead" [Peter Sacks] *1964, October 27: "The last stand on Earth" [Gary Kamiya] *1965, September 11: The Council on Interracial Books for Children [Dianne Johnson] *1965, October: The Autobiography of Malcolm X [David Bradley] *1968: Norman Mailer [Mary Gaitskill] *1968, March: The illusory babels of language [Hal Foster] *1968, August 28: The plight of conservative literature [Michael Kimmage] *1969: Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems [Laura Quinney] *1969, January 11: The first Asian Americans [Hua Hsu] *1969, November 12: The eye of Vietnam [Thi Phuong-Lan Bui] *1970: Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker [Cheryl A. Wall] *1970; 1972: Linda Lovelace [Ann Marlowe] *1973: Loisaida literature [Frances R. Aparicio] *1973: Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck [Maureen N. McLane] *1975: Gayl Jones [Robert O'Meally] *1981, March 31: Toni Morrison [Farah Jasmine Griffin] *1982: Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story [Sarah Shun-lien Bynum] *1982: Wild Style [Hua Hsu] *1982: Maya Lin's wall [Anne M. Wagner] *1982, November 8: Harriet Wilson [Saidiya V. Hartman] *1985, April 24: Henry Roth [Mario Materassi] *1987: Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey [Seo-Young Chu] *1995: Philip Roth [Hana Wirth-Nesher] *2001: Twenty-first-century free verse [Stephen Burt] *2003: Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing [Greil Marcus] *2005, August 29: Hurricane Katrina [Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors] *2008, November 4: Barack Obama [Kara Walker] * Contributors * Index