America at 250: A country examined by its writers

Today, the United States marks 250 years since its Declaration of Independence. Print, online and TV news will no doubt be full of ceremonies, flyovers, and speeches extolling the virtues of the land of the free and home of the brave.

However, there’s another way to look at it. A full accounting of America’s two-and-a-half centuries isn’t only to be found in its monuments and myths. One should also look at the margins.

It’s America’s writers who have often recorded such fissures and erasures. Some of them have been openly defiant, and others have created warning scenarios, both real and imaginary. There’s a rich tradition of both.

Take Henry David Thoreau’s justly famous Civil Disobedience (1849), to start with. It was written after the writer spent a night in a Massachusetts jail for refusing to pay a poll tax that, he believed, funded war and slavery.

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Civil Disobedience makes a powerful argument: an individual’s conscience is superior to an unjust law. Not the sort of thing that any autocratic leader wants to hear.

Writing against power

Such ideas, once expressed, have a tendency to travel. Decades later in South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi found in Thoreau an inspiration for his own struggle against British colonial rule.

This, of course, took the form of satyagraha, his “soul force”. The wheel turned again when Martin Luther King Jr. adopted Gandhian non-violence to battle American segregation in the 1960s.

Consider also James Baldwin, whose uncompromising stance was his hallmark. In his ‘Autobiographical Notes,’ he writes: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually.” For Baldwin, as for many others, criticism was not an unpatriotic act.

The novels that saw trouble coming

That conscience emerges in many other notable works of non-fiction. Fiction writers, too, have heeded the call. Memorably, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) portrayed slavery as a haunting presence that illuminates the present.

Then, Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020), drawn from her own grandfather’s fight, rendered the experience of Native American dispossession that started long before the republic itself.

Other novels took up the argument in other ways. In It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis imagined a populist takeover of the United States. His warning was that authoritarianism doesn’t arrive by shouting foreign slogans, but comes wrapped in the domestic flag.

His contemporary John Steinbeck showed the other end of the spectrum. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) portrayed the eviction of Dust Bowl farmers during the Great Depression as an indictment of a faceless system. One that could shatter families without anyone in particular being to blame.

(When the book was publicly burned in California, a man who set it ablaze reportedly later admitted he hadn't read it. Typical.)

These warnings remain apt, and many contemporary writers, especially of fiction, have mined the subject in dystopian ways. Look at Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel (2025), which imagines ordinary life while imprisoned by an all-seeing surveillance state.

Meanwhile, Tommy Orange’s There There (2018) shows the violence of urban Native displacement. Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) imagines a second civil war, this time fought over fossil fuels.

America through other eyes

The other side of America’s story has also often been told by writers from countries that felt its impact. Notably, Gabriel García Márquez folded the 1928 Banana Massacre of Colombia’s United Fruit workers into One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Eduardo Galeano traced similar depredations across centuries in his Memory of Fire trilogy. Isabel Allende fictionalised the aftermath of a CIA-supported coup in The House of the Spirits. And Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer showed the horrors of everyday labour in occupied Iraq.

Mingled with the applause of the 250th anniversary celebrations, then, there should also be an audit. Along with the republic’s real accomplishments should be heard the voices of writers claiming that the work is not yet finished.