When the American Puritan colonies were founded in the mid-seventeenth century, American Puritanism was a minor offshoot of English Protestantism. It grew in cultural importance retrospectively, however, as New England prospered and played a major role in the formation of the United States. American Puritan writing thence became one of the founding literatures of the new nation. The Puritan colonies had been the most literate, organised and economically successful of all the early English-speaking colonies, and their legacy was emphasized by the influential nineteenth-century New England writers, including Emerson, Hawthorne and Longfellow. But as revisionist scholars remind us, the Puritans were only one culture among many which …

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Citation: Morris, Amy M.E.. "American Puritan Writing". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 November 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1684, accessed 25 November 2024.]