Unlike the works of many of his contemporaries, Moses Coit Tyler's A History of American Literature (1878) and The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (1897) are not outdated. They remain today the standard works on American literature and the starting points of all modern writing on the subject. The History and Literary History are uniformly the first entries in bibliographies and the first mentioned in critical studies of American colonial literature.

Tyler surveyed and classified the full spectrum of colonial literature. His works imposed a rational order and method to American literary studies that have not been superseded. As a historian, Tyler was the first to use systematically American literature to interpret American history. His Literary History of the American Revolution is social and intellectual history, solidly based on the literature of the Revolution. In this work he innovated a methodology of historical research and a sophisticated historical...