Puritan and Colonial American Literature

Core Idea

The first unit of most American literature surveys covers writing from the English colonies of New England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Puritan writers produced histories, sermons, diaries, captivity narratives and poems, and they read every event as a sign of God's providence. Their "plain style" aimed at clear instruction rather than ornament. Works such as William Bradford's *Of Plymouth Plantation*, John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity," Anne Bradstreet's poems and Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" set themes that later American writers kept returning to: a chosen community, moral self-examination and the meaning of the wilderness.

How It's Best Learned

Read the "city upon a hill" passage from Winthrop and a chapter from Bradford, and list every event the writer attributes to God's hand. Then read Bradstreet's "Verses upon the Burning of Our House" and track the turn from grief to acceptance. Close with a passage from Edwards's sermon and ask how its images are designed to move listeners.

Common Misconceptions

• The Puritans rejected poetry and imaginative writing. (They distrusted some kinds of ornament, but they wrote and printed poetry. The *Bay Psalm Book* (1640) was the first book printed in British North America, and Bradstreet and Edward Taylor wrote sophisticated verse.)
• Puritan writing is all about fear and punishment. (Edwards's sermon is famous for its terror, but Bradstreet writes about married love and Taylor about joy in divine grace.)
• Colonial American literature means only New England Puritans. (Other writers include Captain John Smith in Virginia and Native authors such as Samson Occom. Puritan New England is the usual starting point because of its large written record.)

Explainer

The settlers who founded Plymouth in 1620 and Massachusetts Bay in 1630 were Protestants who wanted a church purified of practices they saw as corrupt. They also wrote a great deal. Writing was a way to record God's work, to examine one's own soul, and to teach the next generation.

William Bradford, governor of Plymouth, wrote *Of Plymouth Plantation* between 1630 and 1651. It recounts the voyage of the *Mayflower* and the colony's first decades, and it treats survival, sickness and conflict as signs of providence. Bradford says he writes "in a plain style." That phrase names a Puritan ideal: clear language that instructs instead of showing off.

John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity" (1630), traditionally said to have been delivered to the Massachusetts Bay colonists during or before their voyage, imagines the colony as a community bound by covenant. "We shall be as a city upon a hill," he warns, and "the eyes of all people are upon us." Later Americans would quote that image as a statement of national purpose.

Puritan poetry is more varied than its reputation. Anne Bradstreet's poems were published in London in 1650 as *The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America*. In "To My Dear and Loving Husband," she writes of married love, and in "Verses upon the Burning of Our House" she moves from grief over lost possessions to the faith that her real home is in heaven. Edward Taylor, a minister, wrote intricate meditations in verse that were not published until 1939.

Prose took many forms. Mary Rowlandson's narrative of her captivity during King Philip's War, published in 1682, became one of the most widely read books in the colonies. In 1741, during the religious revival called the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards preached "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which pictures the sinner held over the pit of hell like a spider over a fire.

When you read these texts, look for providential interpretation, self-examination and the idea of a chosen community. Those habits of mind return in Hawthorne, in Emerson's rebellion against them, and in American political speech.