Since the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock, American literature and government documents have been connected in a number of ways. In fact, until what became known as the American Renaissance, American literature and government documents were often one in the same thing, take for example The Federalist Papers. In the nineteenth century, the relationship between literature and the government took a shape more recognizable to present-day readers, one in which authors criticized government policy often in an attempt to effect change, such was the case with Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin .
However, authors of the twentieth century took a more aggressive approach.
Some drew so much attention to a particular social situation that an entirely new government agency was formed.
For example, Upton Sinclair's depiction of the Chicago meat-packing industry in
The Jungle (1906) sparked Congress
to pass the Pure Food and Drugs
Act of 1906 and led to the formation of the Food and Drug Administration.
Others, because of their creative commentaries, were subpoenaed to appear
in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, like Arthur Miller.
Some
parodied recent historical events to satirize, in the most of scathing ways, the President of the United States, such as Robert Coover's depiction
of and Richard Nixon's involvement in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Trial in The Public Burning (1977).
Still others have used government documents as source material to reconstruct historical events. For example, Don DeLillo used the Warren Commission Report and The House Select Committee Report on Assassinations to write Libra (1988).
Recognizing the abundant, if problematic, material gathered on Native Americans by the U.S. Government (see for example Henry R. Schoolcraft's Indian Tribes of the United States), another contemporary author, Diane Glancy, used the the Journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in her Stone Heart : A Novel of Sacajawea(2003). Glancy's novel transcribes select portions of the Lewis and Clark Journals into one column of the page and then creates a counternarrative told from Sacajawea's point of view in the other column, thereby imagining her untold history.
Although this is an extremely brief history of the use of government documents in American literature, research in this area offers an abundance of opportunities to scholars who wish to investigate the social, historical, political, and/or cultural importance of these texts.
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