What’s American About American Literature?

In this 250th anniversary year it is altogether fitting and proper to celebrate our national scripture, the Declaration of Independence. When the founders signed it, they were committing an act of principled treason, which is why the remark attributed to Benjamin Franklin—“We must, indeed, all hang together or we will, most assuredly, hang separately”—has the ring of truth whether he said it or not. 

But there’s something else about the Declaration that’s not often recognized. Despite its boldness and daring, it was also an inconclusive, incomplete, even diffident piece of writing. It could just as well have been called the Declaration of Un-Dependence; or Not Dependence; or even Anti-Dependence. It was not a manifesto announcing who we would become. It was a statement of who we no longer were—namely, subjects of the British crown.

Although the Declaration gave birth to a new nation, its authors, like any new parents, could not foresee the future of their newborn. They could not say what kind of nation the new nation would grow up to be. 

Would it have a strong central authority? Or would it be a loose confederation of former colonies? What would its territorial boundaries be? Would the privileges of citizenship be granted by the separate states or by some common government? And, most pressing, despite its soaring assertion that “all men are created equal,” would the new nation continue to tolerate the odious institution of slavery? 

About that last question, the Declaration was squeamish and silent. The man who chiefly wrote it, Thomas Jefferson, though a slaveowner himself, wanted to gesture toward an answer by accusing the king of waging “cruel war against human nature” in “violating [the] most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people . . . captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.” But because many of the signers represented colonies—including Jefferson’s own, Virginia—where slavery was the bedrock of social and economic life, that passage was dropped from the final version. Otherwise, they would not have signed it. 

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Although the Declaration gave birth to a new nation, its authors, like any new parents, could not foresee the future of their newborn. They could not say what kind of nation the new nation would grow up to be. 

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These contentions—the meaning of equality in general, the future of slavery in particular, the right of other aggrieved peoples to secede and found nations of their own, as southern Confederates would attempt to do 85 years later while appealing to the Declaration as their authority for creating an independent slave-based nation—were left to posterity. 

The openness and self-contradiction of the Declaration are what make it not merely a political tract but a work of literature, which the great twentieth century critic Lionel Trilling defined as any writing that conveys a sense of the “difficulty, complexity, [and] ambiguity” of human experience. 

The Declaration proclaims that all men are created equal, but it does not say how equality can be attained or assured. It says that all men have an inalienable right to pursue happiness, but it does not say what happiness means or how far one may seek it without denying happiness to others. By its eloquence, it articulated the aspiration of a people newly conscious of their nationhood. By its reticence, it conferred upon posterity the obligation to confront these perennial problems into the limitless future. 

It took many decades before America possessed an authentic American literature fully capable of grappling with such questions. Our politics may have been radical and new, but our culture remained tame and derivative. As late as the 1850s, our first great poet, Walt Whitman, was lamenting that we still took “the models of our literature . . . from other lands.” His contemporary Herman Melville complained of “literary flunkeyism to England.” 

Out of this youthful insolence came writers—Melville and Whitman high among them—whose voices were not prim or decorous but brash and boisterous. They spoke with what Whitman proudly called a “barbaric yawp.” They didn’t write tidy novels about genteel society in which the big question was who would marry whom. Instead, they wrote about a monomaniac sea captain hunting the monstrous whale that had ripped his body apart (Moby-Dick); or about a Puritan minister who, following an adulterous affair with a beautiful young woman, brands the letter A, for adulterer, into his own flesh (The Scarlet Letter by Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne); or about a white boy floating southward on a raft with an enslaved black man whom at first he mocks but later comes to love (Huckleberry Finn). 

On the one hand, the new American literature was animated by full-throated patriotism. “The United States themselves,” Whitman declared to a dubious world, “are the greatest poem.” But it was also a literature of candid anger and shame. “We are the chosen people,” Melville liked to boast. But he also acknowledged that the persistence of slavery was “a sin . . . a blot foul as the crater pool of hell.” Even Hawthorne, a conservative writer relatively untroubled by slavery, remarked that “in this republican country someone is always at the drowning point.” From that remark there’s a straight line to later writers who disclosed that upwardly mobile America has also been a cruel land of downward mobility, as in Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, about a man at mid-life whose middle-class life crumbles away. 

And then there is the hard truth—forced into the American consciousness by writers from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison—that America has been a land of no mobility for descendants of those whom Jefferson described as a “distant people” carried here against their will. 

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The central subject of our literature, starting with the Declaration, has been the burden of freedom.

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Our best writers have always been preoccupied with our nation’s contradictions. They celebrated what Hawthorne called America’s “democracy of good feeling” even as they revealed it to be a cauldron of jealousies and hatreds. Beneath our political order—or disorder—they saw that human beings harbor demons at war with what Abraham Lincoln, who revered the Declaration, called the “better angels of our nature.” Captain Ahab is both hero and monster. Huck Finn is both a cruel child and a generous man. Jay Gatsby is both a serial liar and a faithful lover. 

Over the last two centuries, American literature has been advanced by writers from a vast range of origins, including Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, African, Jewish, and, more recently, East Asian, South Asian, Native American, Latin American, Middle Eastern, women, men, gay and straight, and by those seeking to re-invent their sexual identity for themselves. 

What they all share is the effort to understand what Henry James called “the complex fate” of being an American—by which he meant that, ever since achieving cultural as well as political independence, we have been an unmoored people who live with few guideposts or boundaries, in a world where little is proscribed and almost nothing is prescribed. The central subject of our literature, starting with the Declaration, has been the burden of freedom. 

Some 50 years ago, a great American writer, Philip Roth, wrote a novel called The Professor of Desire, whose title character ponders what he might say to his students on the first day of class: 

I love teaching literature . . . To my mind there is nothing quite like the classroom in all of life. Sometimes when we are in the midst of talking—when one of you, say, has pierced with a single phrase right to the heart of the book at hand, I want to cry out, “Dear friends, cherish this!” . . . I doubt that you know how very affecting it is to hear you speak thoughtfully and in all earnestness about solitude, illness, longing, loss, suffering, delusion, hope, passion, love, terror, corruption, calamity, and death. . . . the unrelenting forces with which in time you will all contend, like it or not. 

This is the stuff of literature—the ardors, fears, self-deceptions, and resilient hopes of human experience. 

Today, one hears urgent calls for a revival of civic education—the kind of education that prepares young people to participate in our democracy. Reading our founding political documents—not only the Declaration but also the Federalist Papers and Constitution, by which the founders tried to define the nation which the Declaration had left undefined—is essential for such an education. 

But if we hope to understand our country with honesty as well as pride, we must ensure that literature, despite the odds stacked against it—the allure of social media, the menace of artificial intelligence, the hostility of those who scorn it for lacking practical worth—remains a core part of civic education. 

Literature is the voice of our collective conscience. 

About the Author

ANDREW DELBANCO is Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and President of the Teagle Foundation. These remarks were delivered at the annual Summit on Civic Education hosted at the National Constitution Center by the Jack Miller Center.