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2 Colonial literature. ... The American Revolutionary Period (1775–1783) ... At this time, American Indian literature also began to flourish.
A distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," was published in 1773. She was one of the best-known poets of her day, at least in the colonies, and her poems were typical of New England culture at the time, meditating on religious and classical ...
Included in this category are novels set in the geographical area which later became the United States, from earliest years of exploration to the American Revolutionary War. Novels which begin before the war but are mainly in the Revolutionary War period should be listed in the Category: American Revolutionary War novels.
New England's rich literary history begins with the oral tradition of Native American tribes. During the colonial period, Stephen Daye set up the first British-American printing press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, in 1640, published the Bay Psalm Book as the first book printed in British North America.
The majority of the books and pamphlets of the period bore a Boston imprint, making eastern Massachusetts the literary and typographic center of colonial America. [25] Colonial newspapers played an active role during the Christian revivalist controversy that occurred in the early 1740s.
Critic and author John Neal was unique in this early period for demanding and experimenting with natural diction and "ungenteel and sometimes bluntly profane" [11] American colloquialism. [12] The predominant early rhetoric is exemplified by James Fenimore Cooper , who in 1828 claimed that "the literature of England and that of America must be ...
The New England Primer was the first reading primer designed for the American colonies. It became the most successful educational textbook published in 17th-century colonial United States and it became the foundation of most schooling before the 1790s. In the 17th century, the schoolbooks in use had been Bibles brought over from England.
The earliest literature written in what would become the American South dates back to the colonial era, in particular Virginia; the explorer John Smith wrote an account of the founding of the colonial settlement of Jamestown in the early 17th century, while planter William Byrd II kept a diary of his day-to-day affairs during the early 18th ...