共用题干
第一篇
The Beginning of American Literature
America has always been a land of beginnings.After Europeans"discovered"America in the fifteenth
century,the mysterious New World became for many people a genuine hope of a new life,an escape from
poverty and persecution,a chance to start again.We can say that,as a nation,America begins with that
hope.When,however,does American literature begin?
American literature begins with Amnerican experiences.Long before the first colonists arrived,before
Christopher Columbus,before the Northmen who"found"America about the year 1000,Native Americans
lived here. Each trilbe's literature was tightly woven into the fabric of daiiy life and reflected the unmistakably
American experience of lining with the land。Anoiher kind of experience,one filled with fear and excite-
ment,found its expression in the reports that Columbus and other explorers sent home in Spain,French and
English.In addition,the journals of the people who lived and died in the New England wilderness tell
unforgettable tales of hard and sometimes heartbreaking experiences of those early years.
Experience,then,is the key to early American literature.The New World provided a great variety of
experiences,and these experiences deniauded a wide variety of expressions by an even wider variety of early
American writers.These wnters included John Smith,who spent only two-and-a-half year on the American
continent.They included Jonathlan Edwards and William Byrd,who thought of themselves as British sub-
jects,never suspecting a revolution that would create a United States of America with a literature of its own.
American Indians,explorers,Puritan ministers,frontier wives,plantation owners一they are all the creators
of the first American literature.
The main purpose of the last paragraph is to tell the readers that_____________.
A:in the early days most American writers were from Great Britain
B:people with rich life experience became writers
C:there were many writers in the early days of American history
D:early-day experience provided the foundation for American literature