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The Beginning of American Literature



America has always been a land of beginnings.After Europeans"discovered"America in the fifteenth

century,the mysterious New World became for many people a genuine hope of a new life,an escape from

poverty and persecution,a chance to start again.We can say that,as a nation,America begins with that

hope.When,however,does American literature begin?

American literature begins with Amnerican experiences.Long before the first colonists arrived,before

Christopher Columbus，before the Northmen who"found"America about the year 1000,Native Americans

lived here. Each trilbe's literature was tightly woven into the fabric of daiiy life and reflected the unmistakably

American experience of lining with the land。Anoiher kind of experience,one filled with fear and excite-

ment,found its expression in the reports that Columbus and other explorers sent home in Spain,French and

English.In addition,the journals of the people who lived and died in the New England wilderness tell

unforgettable tales of hard and sometimes heartbreaking experiences of those early years.

Experience,then,is the key to early American literature.The New World provided a great variety of

experiences,and these experiences deniauded a wide variety of expressions by an even wider variety of early

American writers.These wnters included John Smith,who spent only two-and-a-half year on the American

continent.They included Jonathlan Edwards and William Byrd,who thought of themselves as British sub-

jects,never suspecting a revolution that would create a United States of America with a literature of its own.

American Indians,explorers,Puritan ministers,frontier wives,plantation owners一they are all the creators

of the first American literature.
When did American literature begin?
A:Before the American natives lived there.
B:When Columbus and other explorers sent reports back home.
C:When the Northmen found America in about 1000.
D:Long before the year 1000.