North American Literature

• It's not impossible that some people in North America knew how to write before 1500 AD. Some Cherokee people tell stories about an early way of writing, for instance. But there is no evidence from before 1500 of any writing in North America. There's nothing that looked like paper and nothing with writing on it. Most kids learned stories by hearing them told out loud. These stories were usually about religion, or about how people should act.
• The earliest North American literature was mainly sermons by men like Cotton Mather, written in the 1600s and 1700s. African-American people who had come over from Africa as slaves met local Cherokee people and translated traditional African and Cherokee stories into English as Br’er Rabbit stories. By the 1800s people were beginning to write novels or fictional stories, like those of James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans, 1826).
• Novels began to take more serious themes, like Melville's Moby Dick (1851) and Harriet Beacher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) about slavery.
• Soon people were also writing books especially for kids like Horatin Alger stories (1867), or Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer (1987) or Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1909).
• The end of the slavery after the Civil War and the civil rights