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Period: Jan 1, 1500 to
The Renaissance Period
The Renaissance in Europe was in one sense an awakening from the long slumber of the Dark Ages. What had been a stagnant, even backsliding kind of society re-invested in the promise of material and spiritual gain. There was the sincerely held belief that humanity was making progress towards a noble summit of perfect existence.
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The Colonial Period
The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as history than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the intellectual vigor of the English colonists in America by the books that they wrote; those "stern men with empires in their brains" had more pressing work to do than the making of books.
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First Slave Arrive in America
It is late summer. Out of a violent storm appears a Dutch ship. The ship's cargo hold is empty except for twenty or so Africans whom the captain and his crew have recently robbed from a Spanish ship. The captain exchanges the Africans for food, then sets sail.
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Aphra Behn
Aphra Behn was born circa 1640 in Kent, England. While most of her life is a mystery, she was known to have written the short work of fiction entitled Oroonoko, a love story about an African slave, in 1688, and later the play The Forc'd Marriage. Married to a merchant, Behn managed to earn a living through her fiction, poetry and playwriting. Behn died on April 16, 1689, in London, England.
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The Enlightenment Period
The Enlightenment, sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason, was a confluence of ideas and activities that took place throughout the eighteenth century in Western Europe, England, and the American colonies. Scientific rationalism, exemplified by the scientific method, was the hallmark of everything related to the Enlightenment.
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Phillis Wheatley
Born in Senegal about 1753, poet Phillis Wheatley was brought to Boston, Massachusetts, on a slave ship in 1761, and was purchased by John Wheatley as a personal servant to his wife. The Wheatleys educated Phillis, and she soon mastered Latin and Greek, and began writing poetry. She published her first poem at age 12, and her first volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773.
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The Revolutionary Period
It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine colonies to protest against the Stamp Act, and the close of the second war with England, in 1815, as, for literary purposes, a single period. This half-century was the formative era of the American nation.
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Period: to
The Romantic Period
No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetics. Romanticism, then, can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest
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Margaret Fuller
Margaret Fuller was born May 23, 1810 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. She became entwined with intellectuals around Massachusetts, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fuller then conducted "Conversations" with prominent intellectuals of the day and starting the journal The Dial, a transcendentalist magazine.
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Harriet Jacobs
Born in North Carolina in 1813, Harriet Ann Jacobs escaped slavery and moved to New York where she wrote the powerful autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The powerful and comprehensive slave narrative became one of the most influential books of the period.-- Learn More -
Period: to
The Victorian Period
Defining Victorian literature in any satisfactory and comprehensive manner has proven troublesome for critics ever since the nineteenth century came to a close. The movement roughly comprises the years from 1830 to 1900, though there is ample disagreement regarding even this simple point. The name given to the period is borrowed from the royal matriarch of England, Queen Victoria, who sat on throne from 1837 to 1
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Emily Dickinson
Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson left school as a teenager to live a reclusive life on the family homestead. There, she filled notebooks with poetry and wrote hundreds of letters. Dickinson's remarkable work was published after her death—on May 15, 1886. -
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The Trancedentalist Period
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, a philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism took root in America and evolved into a predominantly literary expression. The adherents to Transcendentalism believed that knowledge could be arrived at not just through the senses, but through intuition and contemplation of the internal spirit.
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Period: to
Literature in the Cites
Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States until very recently. Even now the number of those who support themselves by purely literary work is small, although the growth of the reading public and the establishment.
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Period: to
Literature Since 1861
A generation has nearly passed since the outbreak of the civil war, and although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had reached manhood before the conflict opened, or who were old enough at that time to remember clearly its stirring events, the younger men who are daily coming forward to take their places know it only by tradition.
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Edith Wharton
Edith Newbold Jones was born to a distinguished New York family and married wealthy banker Edward Wharton in 1885. After her marriage, she began to write stories set among turn-of-the-century New York society, and won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence. Her best-known work, Ethan Frome is a mainstay of high school English classes.
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First Black Allowed to Vote
Congress passes the Fifteenth Amendment giving African American men the right to vote.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most respected American poets of the 20th century. Millay was known for her riveting readings and feminist views. She penned Renascence, one of her most well known poems, and the book The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Most notably, it was this poem where she coined the popular phrase, "My candle burns at both ends."
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Womens Suffrage
In 1913, the first major national efforts were undertaken, beginning with a massive parade in Washington, D.C., on March 3 -- one day before the inauguration of President Woodrow Wilson. Organized by Alice Paul for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the parade, calling for a constitutional amendment, featured 8,000 marchers, including nine bands, four mounted
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Maya Andelou
Born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou is known for her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman. In 1971, Angelou published the Pulitzer Prize-nominated poetry collection Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die. <ahref='http://www.biography.com/people/maya-angelou-9185388' >-- Learn More</a> -
Toni Morrison
Born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue and richly detailed black characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Morrison has won nearly every book prize possible. She has also been awarded honorary degrees.
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Syliva Plath
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Plath met and married British poet Ted Hughes, although the two later split. The depressive Plath committed suicide in 1963, garnering accolades after her death for the novel The Bell Jar, and the poetry collections The Colossus and Ariel. In 1982, Plath became the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.-- Learn More -
Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954, in Chicago, Illinois. Her novel "The House on Mango Street," about a young Latina woman coming of age in Chicago, has sold more than two million copies. Cisneros has received numerous awards for her work, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Texas Medal of the Arts. She lives in San Antonio, Texas.-- Learn More -
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