<P> The romantic American novel developed fully with Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804--1864) The Scarlet Letter (1850), a stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery . Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819--1891). In Moby - Dick (1851), an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements . By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism were competing with Romanticism in the novel . </P> <P> American realist fiction has its beginnings in the 1870s with the works of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James . </P> <P> Mark Twain (the pen name used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835--1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast--in the border state of Missouri . His regional masterpieces were the novels Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Twain's style changed the way Americans write their language . His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents . </P> <P> Henry James (1843--1916) was a major American novelist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries . Although born in New York City, he spent most of his adult years in England . Many of his novels center on Americans who live in or travel to Europe . James confronted the Old World - New World dilemma by writing directly about it . His works include The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians (1886), The Princess Casamassima (1886). </P>

History of english literature from anglo-saxon period to the present (1960’s)