History of American Literature

pay his poll tax to a government that upheld slavery. When he was imprisoned because of non-payment, Emerson visited him and asked, "Why are you here, Henry?" Thoreau merely rep...

RELATION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE.--The literature produced in that part of America known as the United States did not begin as an independent literature. The early colonists were...

FROM ROMANTICISM TOWARD REALISM.--The enormous circulation of magazines in the United States has furnished a wide market for the writers of fiction. Magazines have especially st...

PLANTATION LIFE AND ITS EFFECT UPON LITERATURE.--Before the war the South was agricultural. The wealth was in the hands of scattered plantation owners, and less centered in citi...

A NEW LITERARY CENTER.--We have seen that Massachusetts supplied the majority of the colonial writers before the French and Indian War. During the next period, Philadelphia came...

CHANGE IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.--Since the death of Jonathan Edwards in the middle of the seventeenth century, New England had done little to sustain her former literary reputation...

PROGRESS TOWARD NATIONALITY.--The French and Indian War, which began in 1754, served its purpose in making the colonists feel that they were one people. At this time most of the...

THE NEWNESS OF THE WEST.-It is difficult for the young of to-day to realize that Wisconsin and Iowa were not states when Hawthorne published his Twice Told Tales (1837), that Lo...

a young girl from torture and kill an Indian. In the next two chapters, the hero kills four Indians. The English recognized this introduction of a new element of strangeness add...

No other work in American literature or history can take the place of this book and of his three great stories (pp. 359-361), which bring us face to face with life in the great...