Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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Chapter 5: the New England period — Preliminary

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The New England impulse.

Some time before the impulse toward a graceful if shallow “polite” literature exhausted itself in New York, a new kind of impulse had begun to make itself felt in New England. Up to the time of the Revolution an extraordinary ignorance of contemporary European literature and art had prevailed throughout the colonies. It is even said that America did not possess a copy of Shakespeare till a hundred years after his death. In the eighteenth century the colonists were by no means slow in getting the latest fashions and the latest delicacies from London; yet they displayed a surprising apathy toward the books which were then to be found on every London table. In 1723 the best college library in America contained nothing by Addison, Pope, Dryden, Swift, Gay, Congreve, or Defoe. Ten years later Franklin founded the first public