The Bible and American Literature

It is a critical commonplace that the King James Bible served as the moral and cultural foundation for the Reformed Protestant community—a People of the Book—that developed in Puritan and colonial America and then continued in this role in the newly established United States well into the twentieth century. Yet the contemporary student of American literature and the Bible is initially confronted with a paradox; for although commentators have long recognized the central role of the King James Bible in the development of the American literary tradition (as in the culture at large), the subject has long occupied a marginal position in the academy. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the study of American literature and the Bible ideally requires competence in two academic realms, as manifested in the work of such past masters as Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, Robert Alter, and Harold Bloom. Having developed in tandem with the growth of literary approaches to the Bible, the study of the influence of the Bible on American literature is now an increasingly recognized area of scholarly interest. Initially a field dominated by Christian scholars, it currently includes all those who recognize the Bible as a culturally authoritative source text for Western culture and tradition. The field has markedly expanded in recent years, with the appearance of key reference books, general surveys, and author studies. Major American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor now have a substantial body of critical commentary on their work in relation to the Bible, while many others have received varying degrees of attention from this vibrant academic discipline.