Initial Studies in American Letters

What if Milton had sailed for Massachusetts—and Paradise Lost had been written in Boston? Henry A. Beers begins with the narrow chances that might have made America’s literary history look very different.

In this late-nineteenth-century study, Beers turns to the colonies of 1607–1765, where sickness, hunger, conflict and the work of making a foothold on a new continent left little time for books. Yet the settlers’ reports, the ambitions of Captain John Smith and the literary fashions carried from England all offer clues to what American writing might become. Beers asks us to look past the familiar image of a picturesque colonial past and consider why a new country’s literature began without the innocence of an infancy. How did a distinct American voice emerge from these hard beginnings?

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