<Tr> <Td> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> </Td> </Tr> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> <P> American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and its preceding colonies . For specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States . Before the founding of the United States, the British colonies on the eastern coast of the present - day United States were heavily influenced by English literature . The American literary tradition began as part of the broader tradition of English literature . </P> <P> The revolutionary period contained political writings by Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine . In the post-war period, Thomas Jefferson's United States Declaration of Independence solidified his status as a key American writer . It was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nation's first novels were published . With the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe . In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803--1882) started a movement known as Transcendentalism . Henry David Thoreau (1817--1862) wrote Walden, which urges resistance to the dictates of organized society . The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world - famous Uncle Tom's Cabin . These efforts were supported by the continuation of the slave narrative autobiography, of which the best known example from this period was Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave . </P>

Why is american literature different from other literature