At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the vast continental area that was to become the United States had been probed only slightly by European xplorers. The settling of this continent occurred surprisingly late.Almost a hundred years earlier the Caribbean Islands, Mexico, and other parts of Central and South America had been occupied by the Spanish. At last early in the seventeenth century, the English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the American national history The earliest settlers included Dutch, Swedes, Germans, French,Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese. Frenchmen settled in the Northern Colonies and along the St. Lawrence River, Swedes along the Delaware, Dutch along the Hudson, Germans and Scotch-Irish in New York and Pennsylvania,and the Spanish in Florida. There were Negroes in New England, the Middle Colonies, and throughout the South; and American Indians were everywhere.All contributed to the forming of the American civilization, but the colonies that became the first United States were for the most part sustained by English traditions, ruled by English laws, supported by English commerce, and named after English monarchs and English lands： Georgia, Carolina, Virginia,Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, and New England.
The first writings that we call American were the narratives and journals of these settlements. They wrote about their voyage to the new land,about adapting themselves to unfamiliar climates and crops, about dealing with Indians. They wrote in diaries and in journals. They wrote letters and contracts and government charters and religious and political statements.
They wrote about the land which stretched before them-unimaginable and immense, with rich dense forests and deep-blue lakes and rich soil. It stirred
the imagination to great heights. All seemed possible through hard work and faith.
The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Among the members of the small band of Jamestown settlers was Captain John Smith, an English soldier of fortune. His reports of exploration, published in the early 1600s, have been described as the first distinctly American literature written in English. Smith'sdescriptions of America were filled with themes, myths, images, scenes,characters, and events that were a foundation for the nation's literature. He portrayed English North America as a land of endless bounty. His vision helped lure the Pilgrims and the Puritans who saw themselves as new saints with a spiritual mission to flee the Old World and create a New Israel, a New Promised Land, in the America that John Smith had described.
The writers of the Southern and Middle Colonies who followed John Smith made their greatest contributions to American literature in the eighteenth century, in the Age of Reason and Revolution. Then there appeared such literary aristocrats as William Byrd II and such political philosophers as Thomas Jefferson. Until that time, literature developed slowly, especially in the South. Farms widely dispersed. Towns were few. Illiteracy was high. The urban audience for books and newspapers was scant. And there was little of the religious ferment and zeal that inspired such a tide ofliterature to flow from Puritan New England.
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