Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Ameri-

can literature was, for the most part, the exclusive province of white writers

of Protestant origin, mostly male, mainly of the eastern seaboard, and

principally of British descent. They had such names as Mather, Edwards,

Franklin, Irving, Cooper, Emerson, Poe, Simms, Hawthorne, Melville,

Stowe, Whitman, Dickinson, Adams, and James. Such Huguenot names as

Freneau and Thoreau were exceptions to this generalization. As for geo-

graphical origin, more than half of those listed were born in Boston or New

York; the others first saw the light seventy miles or closer to the Atlantic

Ocean

Langh

Ohioi

Voices from the Middle West were not heard before Samuel

3rne Clemens and William Dean Howells emerged from Missouri and

~st before the Civil War, and both of these authors spent most of their

adult lives in the Northeast.

To a large degree these patterns were determined by the demographic

facts. British colonial settlement hugged the coast for two centuries before

venturing westward. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston--these

were the centers of literacy, education, and the publishing trade, all neces-

sary for the development of printed literature. After the Revolution, political

power was held almost exclusively by white males of Protestant back-

ground. WASP--White Anglo-Saxon Protestant--is more than a label; it is

an accurate identification of those who controlled the government of the

United States and wrote its books until the twentieth century. But ethno-

centrism (belief that one s own group is superior) was more than a reflection

of the historical process. It was also a doctrine consciously held, the

nationalist and racist narrowness of which unduly restricted for too long a

time our understanding of what constitutes the literature of the North

American continent or even of the landmass north of Mexico and south of

Canada. This is not to say that the fiction of Melville, James, and Heming-

way or the poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost should be in any way

neglected. It is to say that the oral and written literature of Native Ameri-

cans, the Spanish-speaking peoples of the Southwest, the Creoles and Cajuns

of the Louisiana territory, as well as the more recent literature of twentieth-

century immigrants from eastern and southern Europe should all be consid-

ered as part of our multicultural national heritage. Above all, attention is

due to the most copious, the oldest, the most historically significant, the

most socially relevant; and the most aesthetically satisfying, after the English

American, of all our national literatures--that of African Americans.

Some might argue that the oral literary tradition of African Americans

began with Estevanico, an African Spanish soldier in the troops of the

conquistador Coronado s 1540 expedition into what is now Arizona, New