The literatures of the great nations have begun with the childhood of those nations; that is to say, with fairy tales and legends and songs of heroism; with Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” the Song of Beowulf (bay´-o-wulf), to name a few among many of the great beginnings of writing. In this country the pioneer writers shared the conditions of the pioneer builders of homes and communities. They were not, however, a people in their intellectual infancy. The country was new; but the people were old. They had all left literature of a high order behind them. Many of them must have been familiar with poetry and prose in English, French, and German, to say nothing of the classic literature which the scholars knew; and there were many scholars, north and south, among the early settlers. The exploration and settlement of the country was a great adventure, which involved not only peril, but very hard work. In every colony people had to begin at the beginning,--to get roofs over their heads to protect them from the climate, to raise the things they were to eat, to protect themselves from the Indians,--to do a thousand things of which people of our day are unconscious because they were done so long ago. The distances between the colonies were great, the means of communication were slow and infrequent, and the colonists knew very little of one another. They were isolated communities, not in any sense a nation. And so the early writing was the expression of the experiences and convictions of small communities. There cannot be a national literature until there is a national consciousness; and in the early days in America there was not even a sectional consciousness. There was only local consciousness. [Illustration: THE JONATHAN EDWARDS ELM, Northampton, Mass. Set by Jonathan Edwards in 1730--The house of Josiah D. Whitney stands on the right of Edwards’ house] The first book written on the continent was by that flamboyant, but very versatile Virginia colonist, Captain John Smith; a brave soldier, with a very warm and highly inventive imagination, whose habit of boasting has robbed him of a great deal of credit which really belonged to him. He wrote an account of adventures in Virginia, which may be taken as the beginning of American writing, and still has value. There was a long interval during which the writing of the colonists was devoted to theological discussion, or to accounts of the new world in which they were living. A large part of the early writings of New England was more or less theological; but none of this writing rose to the rank of literature until Jonathan Edwards appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century. JONATHAN EDWARDS