Novels for early thirties man reader free#

The search for identity and meaning articulated in Puritan journals appears in many guises in America’s long-fiction tradition. Though Edwards’s harsh God had been replaced by a nearly indifferent craftsman, America’s habit of thought was focused on the quest for personal identity and spiritual journeys central to Puritan self-examination. Puritan temperance, order, frugality, industry, and justice also suited the rational, moral sensibility of Franklin’s Enlightenment God, the deistic Watchmaker-Creator who let the world tick on unhindered. The diaries of Judge Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) and Puritan cleric Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) endorse the same catalog of virtues Benjamin Franklin lists in his Autobiography (1791). Their documents reveal harsh dealings with merchandisers who invaded the colonies only to reap the wealth of the New World. Emphasis on a godly life and personal motives shapes the journals of colonial governors William Bradford (1590-1649) and John Winthrop (1588- 1694).

The original Puritan experiment lasted less than one hundred years but indelibly marked American thought and expression. These contrary and interlocking forces created variety and crosscurrents in American fiction. As the United States expanded, such dichotomies were complicated by tensions between long-settled areas in New England, the genteel South, the expansive plains states, and the wide open West.

Novels for early thirties man reader free#

Geographic, industrial, and social changes found justification in America’s mythic vision of itself independent of England and free of European hierarchy.Ī complex and often contradictory ethos emerged based on tensions in American dualities: Calvinistic sin and predestination opposed to romantic optimism determinism opposed to free will idealism versus materialism European aristocracy opposed to democracy capitalistic prosperity versus economic struggles. Each milestone in improvement and enlargement marked a national movement toward spiritually sanctioned political dominion. Continuing the Puritan belief in America as the New Eden, writers stressed the millennial nature of settlement and progress. America became a subject for literature after the Revolutionary War, when writers began the exploration of themes and motifs distinctly American.