Instructional Programming for Television

After a brief look at the lore of indigenous American Indian peoples and at the journals and accounts of early European explorers, this part focuses on the writing of New England Puritans and the principles that guided their lives and literary efforts. Among the writers covered are John Smith, Richard and Cotton Mather, Anne Bradstreet, Gustavus Vassa, Phillis Wheatley and Edward Taylor.

This part covers the period when the colonists began to seek independence, and Enlightenment thought came into conflict with the persistent legacy of Puritan ideals. New ideas demanded new forms of expression. The leading Revolutionaries were the leading thinkers and writers, and their subject matter was largely political. Amongst those included are Tom Paine, Johan and Abigail Adams, Philip Freneau, and Benjamin Franklin.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are covered in this part, beginning as American authors sought to compete with popular British works. Novels – sentimental, Gothic, and satirical – began to feature American settings and themes. Washington Irving became the first American to gain an international reputation. William Cullen Bryant, Sara Hale, David Walker, Henry Roe Schoolcraft and James Fenimore Cooper are among others discussed.

The turmoil over slavery and the growing Abolitionist movement in the mid-nineteenth century form the backdrop for this part, which focuses on the Transcendentalists and those influenced by them. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Frederick Douglass, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Harriet Beecher Stowe are among the authors covered.

This part covers approximately the same period as part four but discusses those writers not closely associated with the Transcendentalist movement or with the divisive social issues of the years preceding the Civil War. The works of Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson are examined.

Part Six: Realism and Naturalism – 18:50 min.

The conscious movement toward realism in the late nineteenth century is discussed in this part, along with the parallel development of regional variety in the nation’s literature. Realism gave way to naturalism at the century’s close. Writers discussed are Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Joel Chandler Harris, Sarah Orne Jewett, George Washington Cable, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, and Jack London.

Beginning at the turn of the century, when many writers were concerned with social injustice, this part continues into the period following World War I. The wartime need for labor brought a huge influx of black people to New York’s Harlem, giving impetus to the Negro Renaissance. Poetry gained a new importance. Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Hart Crane are among those considered.

This part starts in the postwar world, with the so-called Lost Generation, whose work was marked by stylistic innovation. In this period, as many writers grappled with what they saw as their own and their fellows’ moral collapse, American drama came of age. Among writers discussed are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

This part starts at the end of World War II, when Americans were adjusting to their nation’s powerful new role in the world. Many postwar novels dealt with the war and its implications. Drama and poetry flourished. John Hersey, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, and Robert Lowell are among the writers included.

The technological and social changes that gradually began to influence the very shape of literature are discussed in this part. New subjects gained attention as the white middle-class majority became more aware of the concerns of black people, of ethnic minorities, of women. Literary works combining fact and fiction became known as nonfiction novels or docudramas. Writers covered include Malcolm X, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Hong Kingston, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Eudora Welty, James Dickey , and Robert Penn Warren.

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