Which writer is associated with the Puritan/Colonial era?

• A. Emerson
• B. Herman Melville
• C. Jonathan Edwards
• D. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Answer: (C)

This question tests your ability to place authors in the correct American literature period by looking at historical and thematic clues in their work. Jonathan Edwards is a central figure of the Puritan/Colonial era, a Puritan preacher in early colonial New England who helped shape the era’s religious literature during the Great Awakening. His writings, especially sermons like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, exemplify the intense emphasis on sin, salvation, and divine grace that characterized early American religious writing, as well as a plain, didactic style aimed at exhortation and conversion.

In contrast, Emerson is associated with the 19th-century Transcendentalist movement, a time of philosophical essays and essays on individualism; Herman Melville is a later 19th-century novelist writing in the Romantic and realism-influenced tradition; F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in the 1920s, a period of modernist literature focusing on social change and disillusionment. These contexts place them outside the Puritan/Colonial era.