A History of American Literature

In its beginnings American literature differs from the literatures of most other great nations; it was a transplanted thing. It sprang in a way like Minerva, full-armed from the...

Although it is generally said of the Puritans that they were actually hostile to all the arts, there is abundant proof that they had a liking for verse and a widespread inclinat...

As the end of the seventeenth century approached, the Puritans were still in an overwhelming majority in New England, but the hold of the churchmen on the government of the colo...

The danger in drawing conclusions about a whole century, as we have been doing, is that the facts may be forced to seem far simpler than they were. It should be kept in mind tha...

By 1750 the thirteen colonies had all been long established, and the straggling community on the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Georgia had an individuality of its own. The Ame...

With the Revolutionary War there was naturally a great output of printed matter. Controversial pamphlets, state papers, diaries, letters, and journals, plays (with prologues and...

Memory, 1773; Part III, The Adventures of Miss Harriet Simper, 1773. M'Fingal: a Modern Epic Poem. Canto I; or, The Town Meeting (includes what is now Cantos I and II). 1776. Co...

In the growth of most national literatures the theater has developed side by side with the drama, the stage doing for the play what the printing press did for the essay, poem, a...

The first professional man of letters in America, and the last of note who was born before the Revolution, was Charles Brockden Brown. His short life, from 1771 to 1810, was alm...

The turn to Washington Irving and his chief associates in New York--James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant--is a turn from colonial to national America and from the eig...

Cooper's life (1789-1851) was inclosed by Irving's, for he was born six years later and died eight years earlier. When he was a little more than a year old his father took his l...

The mention of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant as representatives of New York in the early nineteenth century is likely to mislead students into thinking of them as literary associat...

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of the two American poets regarded with greatest respect by authors and critics in England and on the Continent. To Whitman respect is paid be...

With the passing of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant the leadership in American letters was lost to New York. Indeed, by 1850, while all this trio were living, four men in eastern Mas...

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was born in Boston. He came from old Puritan stock, several of his direct ancestors being clergymen. He was one of eight children, of whom six we...

Henry D. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. His grandfather, John Thoreau, a Frenchman, had crossed to America in 1773 and had married a woman of Scotch birth...

The thought of Hawthorne (1804-1864) as a member of the "Concord group" should be made with a mental reservation. He did not belong to Concord in any literal or figurative sense...

Whittier (1807-1892) stands in decided contrast both in upbringing and in career with the other great New England contemporaries. All the rest were college men, graduates of eit...

It is a matter of common practice to mention Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) as a member of "the Cambridge group," with the suggestion that there was some such agreement...

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was born in Cambridge, the youngest of six children. His father, the Reverend Charles Lowell, a Harvard graduate, was pastor of the West Church...

The name of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is in all likelihood not so well known as the title of her most famous work, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Millions upon millions have read...

In the roster of American men of letters it is hard to think of any other who is so completely the product of a district and the spokesman for it as Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-...

In the metropolitan group of the latter half of the nineteenth century Bryant was dominant until his death in 1878. Other conspicuous representatives were Bayard Taylor (1825-18...

The non-mention of any Southern writers for nearly two centuries in a history of American literature is likely to mislead the unthinking reader. Certain qualifying facts should...

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Mark Twain are the two authors whom the rest of the world have chosen to regard as distinctively American. They are in fact more strikingly differen...

There is a valid parallel between the beginnings of American literature and the early stages of its development in the West, for in both instances it followed on the wave of pio...

In the development of a Western literature Sill and Miller, like Bret Harte and Mark Twain and like all the other adult Californians in the pioneer period, were imported from th...

It is very seldom in the history of literature that important developments take place without long preliminaries. From period to period new emphasis is placed on old ideas, and...

From 1865 to 1900 the American drama occupied a place of so little artistic importance in American life that the literary historians have ignored it. There is no word about it i...

All of the calculated activities for the promotion of the stage during the last few years in America have as yet been limited and indirect in their results. Among them it is ver...