What information does the following passage (paragraph 6) mainly convey?

England had a well-established literary tradition at the time—Shakespeare had died only four years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in 1620. By contrast, because North American settlers were occupied with establishing the colonies and had little time to devote to the creation of original works of fiction, the majority of early colonial literature was utilitarian—observations of North American geography, biographies, and treatises.