Initial Studies in American Letters

A generation has nearly passed since the outbreak of the civil war, and although public affairs are still mainly in the hands of men who had reached manhood before the conflict...

The writings of our colonial era have a much greater importance as history than as literature. It would be unfair to judge of the intellectual vigor of the English colonists in...

Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the United States until very recently. Even now the number of those who support themselves by purely literary work is small, alt...

With few exceptions, the men who have made American literature what it is have been college graduates. And yet our colleges have not commonly been, in themselves, literary cente...

It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed between the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of delegates from nine colonies to protest against the Stamp...

reminiscences of Brook Farm in his _American Note Books_, wherein he speaks with a certain resentment of "Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer," which hooked the other cows, and...

The attempt to preserve a strictly chronological order must here be abandoned. About all the American literature in existence that is of any value as _literature_ is the product...

There has been but one movement in the history of the American mind which has given to literature a group of writers having coherence enough to merit the name of a school. This...