The writing of the eighteenth century were of course, greatly influenced by the tremendous political activity of the time. Fiction was still distrusted,but the literature of debate and persuasion was outstanding, as the great thinkers of the time expressed their views about separation from England and what the nature of the new nation should be.
Religious matters were still important in this age. There was a lot of debate and thought going on about traditional religious ideas and about the newly introduced Deistic ones. The deist centered his religion around man and reason rather than around God and faith. But the literature of this century was not nearly so involved with religion as the Seventeenth Century writing had been.
With the growth of newspapers and magazines, the essay form grew in popularity; American writers imitated the English essayists Addison and Steele. The American authors, in fact, were still very heavily influenced by the English in all literature fields. They attempted to imitate more in form than in subject matter, however, for this was also a period of growing nationalism and a desire to write about, and for, Americans.
There was considerably more prose than poetry ( as in the Eighteenth Century of England ) but there were some satiric poems written, and Philip Freneau's rather romantic poems indicated that America was about to follow England into a Romantic Age in literature.