The beginning of American literature derives from European forms and styles. For example: Wieland and other novels written by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) imitate the Gothic novel written at that time in England. Even the stories of Washington Irving (1783-1859), especially Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, look European despite their American scenario.
Although Charles Brockden Brown was not in any way the first novelist of America, as some critics affirm, the amplitude and complexity of his achievements as a writer in several genres (novels, stories, essays and journalistic articles of all kinds, poetry, historiography, commentaries ) make him a crucial figure in the literature and culture of the United States in the 1790s and 1800s, and an important intellectual with influence on both sides of the Atlantic in the era of the French Revolution. He practiced the Gothic novel, very fashionable in his time, and served as inspiration to important authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
James Fenimore Cooper was undoubtedly the most outstanding writer in the post-independence era of the United States His first novel, Precautions, was written from the union between two facts of his private life: the reading his wife made of a book lousy and a bet on his wife in which he claimed to be able to write a better book than she read. His next book, The Spy, prefigures what his later work will be. His most widespread novel, The Last Of The Mohicans, shows us his most accustomed themes: the sea and the borders, the settler and the redskins. He tried to write a History of the Navy. In his pen there is a conspicuous contrast between the violence of what he narrates and the slowness of his prose. He was admired by Honoré de Balzac.
