Literature
13 Pages 3212 Words
d, the Salem witchcraft trials, white conflicts with Native Americans, and the American Revolution provided popular subjects for American historical fiction.
James Fenimore Cooper's first published novel, Precaution (1820), he consciously imitated British fiction of the time, especially the novels of Jane Austen. With The Spy (1821), however, Cooper began his career as a specifically American novelist. This best-seller is set in New York during the American Revolution and has as its main character a spy working for General George Washington. The Pioneers (1823) is one of a series of five novels called the Leather-Stocking Tales. Over the course of the Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper developed one of America's first fictional heroes, the white frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Cooper continued to write until his death in 1851, profoundly influencing the direction of American prose.
New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was also a master of historical fiction. Influenced to some extent by transcendentalism, Hawthorneâs views of the movement were...