Top 33 American Literature Quotes

Lincoln is a genius of language and a brilliant writer who deserves to be seen as part of the canon of great writers in American literature.

If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play ‘The Crucible‘ analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Since ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.

In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature – I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.

I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.

When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master‘s program and studied American literature.

When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.

When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad‘s an English professor. After a year there, I was like, ‘Jesus. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be in the library.’ So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.

People don’t realize how black people, minorities, women as well, all their lives, they have had to make the effort to understand everybody else. All my life, I’ve known American culture very well. I probably know American literature more than the average American.

Great song lyrics are as valid a part of American literature as any novel.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual‘s confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham’s ‘Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.’ To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester’s works and the little urn that contains my mother‘s ashes.

I’ve immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I’m an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it’s beginning to happen.

I’m using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I’m an American poet.

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway‘s influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic – ‘Moby-Dick’ is just about the best book in the world – and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

American literature has always been immigrant.