But what is American Literature? Does it have any identity other than the literal citizenship of its authors? How does it reflect and refract the country? What—and who—is it for?

Here are a few ideas and answers from the digital pages of Lit Hub:

A short history of short fiction by American women • Is the first-person narrator a uniquely American idea? • What the novels of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison reveal about the soul of America • How Lewis and Clark invented the Western • Is Minneapolis the most literary city in America? • How Library of America helped shape the modern American literary canon • How Gravity’s Rainbow embodied America’s post-war fears • Toni Morrison on what Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction reveals about race in America • On the biographical underpinnings of American classic Portnoy’s Complaint • Who is the real patron saint of American realism: Lucie Berlin or Raymond Carver? • Eleanor Lanahan on the legacy of her grandfather’s novel, ahem, The Great Gatsby • Why the “Great American Novel” is still worth pursuing • Sarah Domet on the search for home in American fiction • How America reacted to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings • On Marianne Moore, unexpected celebrity poet of midcentury America • How the history of American literature is the history of its libraries • Sara Baume contemplates America through pattern • Viet Thanh Nguyen on why American literature is the literature of empire • What do Americans really want to read? • Quintessential American fiction, according to the rest of the world.

Robert Louis Stevenson sails from San Francisco on his first voyage to the South Seas. (June 28, 1888) • The Globe Theatre catches fire and burns to the ground during a performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (June 29, 1613) • Arthur Miller's play All My Sons opens at the Coronet Theatre in New York; it will be his first Broadway success (June 29, 1947) • The first Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, is published