Puritan style varied enormously – from complex metaphysical poetry to homely journals and crushingly pedantic religious history. Life was seen as a test; failure led to eternal damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss. The Puritans interpreted all things and events as symbols with deeper spiritual meaning, and left that in advancing their own profit and their community´s well-being, they were also furthering God´s plans. In recording ordinary events to reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors commonly cited the Bible, chapter and verse. The first Puritan colonists who settled New England exemplified the seriousness of reformation Christianity. Known as the Pilgrims they were a small group of believers who had migrated from England to Holland – even than known for its religious tolerance – in 1608 during the time of persecutions. Like most Puritans, they interpreted the Bible literary. WILLIAM BRADFORD (1590 – 1657):
William Bradford was elected governor of Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony shortly after the Separatists landed. He was a deeply pious, self-educated man who had learned several languages. His history of Plymouth Plantation is a clear and compelling account of the colony´s beginning. His description of the first view of America is justly famous. Bradford also recorded the firs document of colonial self-governance. Puritan minds poured their tremendous energies into nonfiction and pious genres: poetry, sermons, theological tracts, and histories. Second chapter – Democratic origins and revolutionary writers.

The hard-fought American Revolution against Britain was the first modern war of liberation against a colonial power. The triumph of American independence seemed to many at the time a divine sign that America and her people were destined for greatness. Military victory fanned nationalistic hopes for a great new literature. Yet with the exception of outstanding political writing, few works of note appeared during or soon after the Revolution. The search for a native literature became a national obsession. It would take 50 years of accumulated history for America to earn its cultural independence and to produce the first great generation of American writers: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.