OCR Paper 1: Prose: American literature 1880–1940
Although the phrase ‘American dream’ was not coined until James Truslow Adams’ The Epic of America (1931), the concept of striving to maximise your potential and ‘live your best life’ is arguably defined in the opening statement of the US Constitution as ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Enshrined in this way, it is less an impulse of human nature, more the first and foremost right of an entitled tribe. Even before the American Revolution, John Murray, the British governor of Virginia, famously noted that the Americans ‘for ever imagine the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled… if they attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west’ (Miller 1944, p. 77)
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