The United States is a continental nation of extraordinary diversity — in landscape, culture, and experience. Its literature reflects the contradictions and aspirations of the American experiment.
American literature is driven by themes of freedom, identity, race, and the frontier. From Melville's oceanic allegories to Morrison's explorations of slavery's legacy, from Hemingway's spare prose to Faulkner's labyrinthine Southern narratives, American writers have constantly reinvented the novel. The country's literature is as vast and varied as its geography.