First published 2013
Philip Gura examines the American novel's first hundred years through a religious lens. He argues that early American novelists wrote primarily to teach moral lessons rather than create art. The story begins with William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy in 1789 and follows bestsellers like Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette. Gura recovers forgotten voices including escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, free black Philadelphian Frank Webb, and John Neal. He traces how novels evolved from religious tracts and cautionary tales of seduction into more complex works. Catharine Maria Sedgwick critiqued Puritan strictures while George Lippard warned against social inequality in The Quaker City. By the 1850s, Hawthorne and Melville began exploring interior doubt and individualism, marking a cultural shift from collective faith to personal belief. Gura includes discussions of publishing technologies and the literary culture of early New York and Boston. This comprehensive history reveals how American fiction emerged from the nation's religious foundations.
Genres: biography, fiction, literary-criticism, american-fiction, historical-fiction, american, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: academic, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: historical-perspective, literary-analysis
Setting: New York, Boston
Period: 1789, 1850s
352 pages · Hardcover · Farrar, Straus and Giroux