outline_us_lit

Outline of

AMERICAN

LITERATURE
k
REVISED EDITION

AMERICAN

LITERATURE

REVISED EDITION

EARLY AMERICAN PUBLISHED BY THE UNITED STATES
DEPARTMENT OF STATE
3AND COLONIAL PERIOD TO 1776
STAFF
DEMOCRATIC ORIGINS
AND REVOLUTIONARY WRITERS, WRITTEN BY: KATHRYN VANSPANCKEREN
EXECUTIVE EDITOR: GEORGE CLACK
1776-1820 14 MANAGING EDITOR: PAUL MALAMUD
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: KATHLEEN HUG
THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, 1820-1860: ART DIRECTOR / DESIGNER:

26ESSAYISTS AND POETS THADDEUS A. MIKSINSKI, JR.
PICTURE EDITOR: JOANN STERN
THE ROMANTIC PERIOD,
Front Cover: © 1994 Christopher Little
1820-1860: FICTION 36
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE RISE OF REALISM: Kathryn VanSpanckeren
is Professor of English at the
1860-1914 47 University of Tampa, has
lectured in American literature
MODERNISM AND widely abroad, and is former
director of the Fulbright-spon-
60EXPERIMENTATION: 1914-1945 sored Summer Institute in
American Literature for
AMERICAN POETRY, international scholars. Her
publications include poetry and
1945–1990: THE ANTI-TRADITION 79 scholarship. She received
her Bachelors degree from the
AMERICAN PROSE, University of California,
1945–1990: Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from
Harvard University.
97REALISM AND EXPERIMENTATION

121CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY

136CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE

GLOSSARY 157

INDEX 163

The following text materials may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder.
“In a Station of the Metro” (page 63) by Ezra Pound. From Ezra Pound Personae.

Copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Translated and reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corporation.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (page 65) by Robert Frost. From The Poetry of
Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923. © 1969 by Henry Holt and
Co., Inc., © 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted and translated by permission of Henry Holt and
Co., Inc.

“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” (page 66) by Wallace Stevens. From Selected Poems by
Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by per-
mission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

“The Red Wheelbarrow” (page 66) and “The Young Housewife” (page 67) by William Carlos
Williams. Collected Poems. 1909-1939. Vol. I. Copyright 1938 by New Directions
Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (page 69) by Langston Hughes. From Selected Poems by
Langston Hughes. Copyright 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and renewed 1954 by Langston
Hughes. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (page 80) by Randall Jarrell from Randall Jarrell:
Selected Poems; © 1945 by Randall Jarrell, © 1990 by Mary Von Schrader Jarrell, published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux. Permission granted by Rhoda Weyr Agency, New York.

"The Wild Iris" (page 125) from The Wild Iris by Louise Glück. Copyright © 1993 by Louise
Glück. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

"Chickamauga" (page 126) from Chickamauga by Charles Wright. Copyright © 1995 by
Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

"To The Engraver of my Skin" (page 129) from Source by Mark Doty. Copyright © 2001 by
Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

"Mule Heart" (page 130) from The Lives of The Heart by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 1997
by Jane Hirshfield. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

"The Black Snake" (page 131) copyright © 1979 by Mary Oliver. Used with permission of the
Molly Malone Cook Literary Agency.

"The Dead" (page 132) is from Questions About Angels by Billy Collins, © 1991. Reprinted by
permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

"The Want Bone" (page 133) from The Want Bone by Robert Pinsky. Copyright © 1991 by
Robert Pinsky. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Yusef Komunyakaa, "Facing It" (page 134) from Dien Cai Dau in Pleasure Dome: New and
Collected Poems, © 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan
University Press.

A number of the illustrations appearing in this volume are also copyrighted, as is indicated on
the illustrations themselves. These may not be reprinted without the permission of the copy-
right holder.

The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the
U.S. government.

2

CHAPTER some tales of a high god or culture were told
elsewhere. However, there are no long, stan-
1 dardized religious cycles about one supreme
divinity. The closest equivalents to Old World
EARLY AMERICAN AND spiritual narratives are often accounts of
shamans’ initiations and voyages. Apart from
COLONIAL PERIOD TO 1776 these, there are stories about culture heroes
such as the Ojibwa tribe’s Manabozho or the
American literature begins with the orally Navajo tribe’s Coyote. These tricksters are treat-
transmitted myths, legends, tales, and ed with varying degrees of respect. In one tale
lyrics (always songs) of Indian cultures. they may act like heroes, while in another they
There was no written literature among the more may seem selfish or foolish. Although past
than 500 different Indian languages and tribal authorities, such as the Swiss psychologist Carl
cultures that existed in North America before Jung, have deprecated trickster tales as express-
the first Europeans arrived. As a result, Na- ing the inferior, amoral side of the psyche, con-
tive American oral literature is quite diverse. temporary scholars — some of them Native
Narratives from quasi-nomadic hunting cultures Americans — point out that Odysseus and
like the Navaho are different from stories of set- Prometheus, the revered Greek heroes, are
tled agricultural tribes such as the pueblo- essentially tricksters as well.
dwelling Acoma; the stories of northern lakeside
dwellers such as the Ojibwa often differ radical- Examples of almost every oral genre can be
ly from stories of desert tribes like the Hopi. found in American Indian literature: lyrics,
chants, myths, fairy tales, humorous anecdotes,
Tribes maintained their own religions — wor- incantations, riddles, proverbs, epics, and leg-
shipping gods, animals, plants, or sacred per- endary histories. Accounts of migrations and an-
sons. Systems of government ranged from cestors abound, as do vision or healing songs and
democracies to councils of elders to theocra- tricksters’ tales. Certain creation stories are
cies. These tribal variations enter into the oral particularly popular. In one well-known creation
literature as well. story, told with variations among many tribes, a
turtle holds up the world. In a Cheyenne version,
Still, it is possible to make a few generaliza- the creator, Maheo, has four chances to fashion
tions. Indian stories, for example, glow with rev- the world from a watery universe. He sends four
erence for nature as a spiritual as well as physi- water birds diving to try to bring up earth from
cal mother. Nature is alive and endowed with the bottom. The snow goose, loon, and mallard
spiritual forces; main characters may be animals soar high into the sky and sweep down in a dive,
or plants, often totems associated with a tribe, but cannot reach bottom; but the little coot, who
group, or individual. The closest to the Indian cannot fly, succeeds in bringing up some mud in
sense of holiness in later American literature is his bill. Only one creature, humble Grandmother
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendental “Over- Turtle, is the right shape to support the mud
Soul,” which pervades all of life. world Maheo shapes on her shell — hence the
Indian name for America, “Turtle Island.”
The Mexican tribes revered the divine
Quetzalcoatl, a god of the Toltecs and Aztecs, and The songs or poetry, like the narratives, range
from the sacred to the light and humorous:
There are lullabies, war chants, love songs, and

3

special songs for children’s games, gambling, English, Spanish, or French. The first European
various chores, magic, or dance ceremonials. record of exploration in America is in a
Generally the songs are repetitive. Short poem- Scandinavian language. The Old Norse Vinland
songs given in dreams sometimes have the clear Saga recounts how the adventurous Leif Ericson
imagery and subtle mood associated with and a band of wandering Norsemen settled
Japanese haiku or Eastern-influenced imagistic briefly somewhere on the northeast coast of
poetry. A Chippewa song runs: America — probably Nova Scotia, in Canada —
in the first decade of the 11th century, almost 400
A loon I thought it was years before the next recorded European dis-
But it was covery of the New World.
My love’s
splashing oar. The first known and sustained contact be-
tween the Americas and the rest of the world,
Vision songs, often very short, are another dis- however, began with the famous voyage of an
tinctive form. Appearing in dreams or visions, Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, funded
sometimes with no warning, they may be healing, by the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella.
hunting, or love songs. Often they are personal, Columbus’s journal in his “Epistola,” printed in
as in this Modoc song: 1493, recounts the trip’s drama — the terror of
the men, who feared monsters and thought they
I might fall off the edge of the world; the near-
the song mutiny; how Columbus faked the ships’ logs so
I walk here. the men would not know how much farther they
had travelled than anyone had gone before; and
Indian oral tradition and its relation to American the first sighting of land as they neared America.
literature as a whole is one of the richest and least
explored topics in American studies. The Indian Bartolomé de las Casas is the richest source
contribution to America is greater than is often of information about the early contact between
believed. The hundreds of Indian words in every- American Indians and Europeans. As a young
day American English include “canoe,” “tobacco,” priest he helped conquer Cuba. He transcribed
“potato,” “moccasin,” “moose,” “persimmon,” Columbus’s journal, and late in life wrote a long,
“raccoon,” “tomahawk,” and “totem.” Con- vivid History of the Indians criticizing their
temporary Native American writing, discussed in enslavement by the Spanish.
chapter 8, also contains works of great beauty.
Initial English attempts at colonization were
THE LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION disasters. The first colony was set up in 1585 at
Roanoke, off the coast of North Carolina; all its
Had history taken a different turn, the colonists disappeared, and to this day legends
United States easily could have been a are told about blue-eyed Croatan Indians of the
part of the great Spanish or French over- area. The second colony was more permanent:
seas empires. Its present inhabitants might Jamestown, established in 1607. It endured star-
speak Spanish and form one nation with Mexico, vation, brutality, and misrule. However, the liter-
or speak French and be joined with Canadian ature of the period paints America in glowing
Francophone Quebec and Montreal. colors as the land of riches and opportunity.
Accounts of the colonizations became world-
Yet the earliest explorers of America were not renowned. The exploration of Roanoke was care-
fully recorded by Thomas Hariot in A Brief and

4

True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia is important to recognize its richly cosmopolitan
(1588). Hariot’s book was quickly translated into beginnings.
Latin, French, and German; the text and pictures
were made into engravings and widely repub- THE COLONIAL PERIOD IN
lished for over 200 years. NEW ENGLAND

The Jamestown colony’s main record, the writ- It is likely that no other colonists in the his-
ings of Captain John Smith, one of its leaders, is tory of the world were as intellectual as the
the exact opposite of Hariot’s accurate, scientif- Puritans. Between 1630 and 1690, there were
ic account. Smith was an incurable romantic, and as many university graduates in the northeastern
he seems to have embroidered his adventures. section of the United States, known as New
To him we owe the famous story of the Indian England, as in the mother country — an astound-
maiden, Pocahontas. Whether fact or fiction, the ing fact when one considers that most educated
tale is ingrained in the American historical imag- people of the time were aristocrats who were
ination. The story recounts how Pocahontas, unwilling to risk their lives in wilderness condi-
favorite daughter of Chief Powhatan, saved tions. The self-made and often self-educated
Captain Smith’s life when he was a prisoner of Puritans were notable exceptions. They wanted
the chief. Later, when the English persuaded education to understand and execute God’s will
Powhatan to give Pocahontas to them as a as they established their colonies throughout
hostage, her gentleness, intelligence, and beauty New England.
impressed the English, and, in 1614, she married
John Rolfe, an English gentleman. The marriage The Puritan definition of good writing was that
initiated an eight-year peace between the col- which brought home a full awareness of the im-
onists and the Indians, ensuring the survival of portance of worshipping God and of the spiritual
the struggling new colony. dangers that the soul faced on Earth. Puritan
style varied enormously — from complex meta-
In the 17th century, pirates, adventurers, and physical poetry to homely journals and crushing-
explorers opened the way to a second wave of ly pedantic religious history. Whatever the style
permanent colonists, bringing their wives, chil- or genre, certain themes remained constant. Life
dren, farm implements, and craftsmen’s tools. was seen as a test; failure led to eternal damna-
The early literature of exploration, made up of tion and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss.
diaries, letters, travel journals, ships’ logs, and This world was an arena of constant battle
reports to the explorers’ financial backers — between the forces of God and the forces of
European rulers or, in mercantile England and Satan, a formidable enemy with many disguises.
Holland, joint stock companies — gradually was Many Puritans excitedly awaited the “millenni-
supplanted by records of the settled colonies. um,” when Jesus would return to Earth, end
Because England eventually took possession of human misery, and inaugurate 1,000 years of
the North American colonies, the best-known peace and prosperity.
and most-anthologized colonial literature is
English. As American minority literature contin- Scholars have long pointed out the link
ues to flower in the 20th century and American between Puritanism and capitalism: Both rest on
life becomes increasingly multicultural, scholars ambition, hard work, and an intense striving for
are rediscovering the importance of the conti- success. Although individual Puritans could not
nent’s mixed ethnic heritage. Although the story know, in strict theological terms, whether they
of literature now turns to the English accounts, it were “saved” and among the elect who would go
to heaven, Puritans tended to feel that earthly

5

Painting courtesy Smithsonian Institution

“The First Thanksgiving,” a painting by J.L.G. Ferris, depicts America’s early settlers and Native Americans
celebrating a bountiful harvest.

success was a sign of election. Wealth and status Like most Puritans, they interpreted the Bible

were sought not only for themselves, but as literally. They read and acted on the text of the

welcome reassurances of spiritual health and Second Book of Corinthians — “Come out from

promises of eternal life. among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord.”

Moreover, the concept of stewardship encour- Despairing of purifying the Church of England

aged success. The Puritans interpreted all things from within, “Separatists” formed underground

and events as symbols with deeper spiritual “covenanted” churches that swore loyalty to the

meanings, and felt that in advancing their own group instead of the king. Seen as traitors to the

profit and their community’s well-being, they king as well as heretics damned to hell, they

were also furthering God’s plans. They did not were often persecuted. Their separation took

draw lines of distinction between the secular and them ultimately to the New World.

religious spheres: All of life was an expression of

the divine will — a belief that later resurfaces in William Bradford (1590-1657)

Transcendentalism. William Bradford was elected governor of

In recording ordinary events to reveal their Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony short-

spiritual meaning, Puritan authors commonly ly after the Separatists landed. He was a deeply

cited the Bible, chapter and verse. History was a pious, self-educated man who had learned sever-

symbolic religious panorama leading to the al languages, including Hebrew, in order to “see

Puritan triumph over the New World and to God’s with his own eyes the ancient oracles of God in

kingdom on Earth. their native beauty.” His participation in the

The first Puritan colonists who settled New migration to Holland and the Mayflower voyage

England exemplified the seriousness of Refor- to Plymouth, and his duties as governor, made

mation Christianity. Known as the “Pilgrims,” him ideally suited to be the first historian of his

they were a small group of believers who had colony. His history, Of Plymouth Plantation

migrated from England to Holland — even then (1651), is a clear and compelling account of the

known for its religious tolerance — in 1608, dur- colony’s beginning. His description of the first

ing a time of persecutions. view of America is justly famous:

6

Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea husband eventually became governor of the
of troubles...they had now no friends to wel- Massachusetts Bay Colony, which later grew into
come them nor inns to entertain or refresh the great city of Boston. She preferred her long,
their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or religious poems on conventional subjects such
much less towns to repair to, to seek for as the seasons, but contemporary readers most
succor...savage barbarians...were readier to enjoy the witty poems on subjects from daily life
fill their sides with arrows than otherwise. and her warm and loving poems to her husband
And for the reason it was winter, and they and children. She was inspired by English meta-
that know the winters of that country, know physical poetry, and her book The Tenth Muse
them to be sharp and violent, and subject to Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the
cruel and fierce storms...all stand upon influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and
them with a weatherbeaten face, and the other English poets as well. She often uses elab-
whole country, full of woods and thickets, orate conceits or extended metaphors. “To My
represented a wild and savage hue. Dear and Loving Husband” (1678) uses the ori-
ental imagery, love theme, and idea of compari-
Bradford also recorded the first document son popular in Europe at the time, but gives
of colonial self-governance in the these a pious meaning at the poem’s conclusion:
English New World, the “Mayflower
Compact,” drawn up while the Pilgrims were still If ever two were one, then surely we.
on board ship. The compact was a harbinger of If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
the Declaration of Independence to come a If ever wife was happy in a man,
century and a half later. Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Puritans disapproved of such secular amuse- Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
ments as dancing and card-playing, which were My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
associated with ungodly aristocrats and immoral Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
living. Reading or writing “light” books also fell Thy love is such I can no way repay,
into this category. Puritan minds poured their The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
tremendous energies into nonfiction and pious Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere
genres: poetry, sermons, theological tracts, and That when we live no more, we may live ever.
histories. Their intimate diaries and meditations
record the rich inner lives of this introspective Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729)
and intense people.
Like Anne Bradstreet, and, in fact, all of New
Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672) England’s first writers, the intense, brilliant poet
and minister Edward Taylor was born in England.
The first published book of poems by an The son of a yeoman farmer — an independent
American was also the first American book to be farmer who owned his own land — Taylor was a
published by a woman — Anne Bradstreet. It is teacher who sailed to New England in 1668 rather
not surprising that the book was published in than take an oath of loyalty to the Church of
England, given the lack of printing presses in the England. He studied at Harvard College, and, like
early years of the first American colonies. Born most Harvard-trained ministers, he knew Greek,
and educated in England, Anne Bradstreet was Latin, and Hebrew. A selfless and pious man,
the daughter of an earl’s estate manager. She Taylor acted as a missionary to the settlers when
emigrated with her family when she was 18. Her

7

he accepted his lifelong job as a minister in the pled Captain Ahab, a New England Faust whose
frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, 160 quest for forbidden knowledge sinks the ship of
kilometers into the thickly forested, wild interior. American humanity in Moby-Dick (1851). (Moby-
Taylor was the best-educated man in the area, Dick was the favorite novel of 20th-century
and he put his knowledge to use, working as the American novelist William Faulkner, whose pro-
town minister, doctor, and civic leader. found and disturbing works suggest that the
dark, metaphysical vision of Protestant America
Modest, pious, and hard-working, Taylor never has not yet been exhausted.)
published his poetry, which was discovered only
in the 1930s. He would, no doubt, have seen his Like most colonial literature, the poems of
work’s discovery as divine providence; today’s early New England imitate the form and
readers should be grateful to have his poems — technique of the mother country, though
the finest examples of 17th-century poetry in the religious passion and frequent biblical refer-
North America. ences, as well as the new setting, give New
England writing a special identity. Isolated New
Taylor wrote a variety of verse: funeral elegies, World writers also lived before the advent of
lyrics, a medieval “debate,” and a 500-page rapid transportation and electronic communica-
Metrical History of Christianity (mainly a history tions. As a result, colonial writers were imitating
of martyrs). His best works, according to modern writing that was already out of date in England.
critics, are the series of short preparatory Thus, Edward Taylor, the best American poet of
meditations. his day, wrote metaphysical poetry after it had
become unfashionable in England. At times, as in
Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) Taylor’s poetry, rich works of striking originality
grew out of colonial isolation.
Michael Wigglesworth, like Taylor an English-
born, Harvard-educated Puritan minister who Colonial writers often seemed ignorant of
practiced medicine, is the third New England such great English authors as Ben Jonson. Some
colonial poet of note. He continues the Puritan colonial writers rejected English poets who
themes in his best-known work, The Day of belonged to a different sect as well, thereby cut-
Doom (1662). A long narrative that often falls ting themselves off from the finest lyric and dra-
into doggerel, this terrifying popularization of matic models the English language had pro-
Calvinistic doctrine was the most popular poem duced. In addition, many colonials remained
of the colonial period. This first American best- ignorant due to the lack of books.
seller is an appalling portrait of damnation to hell
in ballad meter. The great model of writing, belief, and conduct
was the Bible, in an authorized English transla-
It is terrible poetry — but everybody loved it. tion that was already outdated when it came
It fused the fascination of a horror story with the out. The age of the Bible, so much older than
authority of John Calvin. For more than two cen- the Roman church, made it authoritative to
turies, people memorized this long, dreadful Puritan eyes.
monument to religious terror; children proudly
recited it, and elders quoted it in everyday New England Puritans clung to the tales of the
speech. It is not such a leap from the terrible Jews in the Old Testament, believing that they,
punishments of this poem to the ghastly self- like the Jews, were persecuted for their faith,
inflicted wound of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s guilty that they knew the one true God, and that they
Puritan minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, in The were the chosen elect who would establish the
Scarlet Letter (1850) or Herman Melville’s crip- New Jerusalem — a heaven on Earth. The

8

Puritans were aware of the parallels COTTON MATHER Sewall was born late enough to
between the ancient Jews of the Old see the change from the early,
Testament and themselves. Moses Engraving © The Bettmann strict religious life of the Puritans
led the Israelites out of captivity Archive to the later, more worldly Yankee
from Egypt, parted the Red Sea period of mercantile wealth in the
through God’s miraculous assis- New England colonies; his Diary,
tance so that his people could which is often compared to
escape, and received the divine law Samuel Pepys’s English diary of
in the form of the Ten Command- the same period, inadvertently
ments. Like Moses, Puritan leaders records the transition.
felt they were rescuing their people
from spiritual corruption in England, Like Pepys’s diary, Sewall’s
passing miraculously over a wild sea is a minute record of his daily
with God’s aid, and fashioning new life, reflecting his interest in living
laws and new forms of government piously and well. He notes little
after God’s wishes. purchases of sweets for a woman
he was courting, and their dis-
Colonial worlds tend to be archaic, agreements over whether he
and New England certainly was no should affect aristocratic and ex-
exception. New England Puritans pensive ways such as wearing a
were archaic by choice, conviction, wig and using a coach.
and circumstance.
Mary Rowlandson
Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) (c. 1635-c.1678)

Easier to read than the highly reli- The earliest woman prose
gious poetry full of Biblical refer- writer of note is Mary Rowland-
ences are the historical and secular son, a minister’s wife who gives a
accounts that recount real events clear, moving account of her 11-
using lively details. Governor John week captivity by Indians during an
Winthrop’s Journal (1790) provides Indian massacre in 1676. The book
the best information on the early undoubtedly fanned the flame of
Massachusetts Bay Colony and Pu- anti-Indian sentiment, as did John
ritan political theory. Williams’s The Redeemed Captive
(1707), describing his two years in
Samuel Sewall’s Diary, which re- captivity by French and Indians
cords the years 1674 to 1729, is lively after a massacre. Such writings
and engaging. Sewall fits the pattern as women produced are usually
of early New England writers we domestic accounts requiring no
have seen in Bradford and Taylor. special education. It may be
Born in England, Sewall was brought argued that women’s literature
to the colonies at an early age. He benefits from its homey realism
made his home in the Boston area, and common-sense wit; certainly
where he graduated from Harvard, works like Sarah Kemble Knight’s
and made a career of legal, adminis- lively Journal (1825) of a daring
trative, and religious work.

9

solo trip in 1704 from Boston to New York and between church and state — still a fundamental
back escapes the baroque complexity of much principle in America today. He held that the law
Puritan writing. courts should not have the power to punish peo-
ple for religious reasons — a stand that under-
Cotton Mather (1663-1728) mined the strict New England theocracies. A
believer in equality and democracy, he was a life-
No account of New England colonial literature long friend of the Indians. Williams’s numerous
would be complete without mentioning Cotton books include one of the first phrase books of
Mather, the master pedant. The third in the four- Indian languages, A Key Into the Languages of
generation Mather dynasty of Massachusetts Bay, America (1643). The book also is an embryonic
he wrote at length of New England in over 500 ethnography, giving bold descriptions of Indian
books and pamphlets. Mather’s 1702 Magnalia life based on the time he had lived among the
Christi Americana (Ecclesiastical History of New tribes. Each chapter is devoted to one topic —
England), his most ambitious work, exhaustive- for example, eating and mealtime. Indian words
ly chronicles the settlement of New England and phrases pertaining to this topic are mixed
through a series of biographies. The huge book with comments, anecdotes, and a concluding
presents the holy Puritan errand into the wilder- poem. The end of the first chapter reads:
ness to establish God’s kingdom; its structure
is a narrative progression of representative If nature’s sons, both wild and tame,
American “Saint’s Lives.” His zeal somewhat Humane and courteous be,
redeems his pompousness: “I write the wonders How ill becomes it sons of God
of the Christian religion, flying from the depriva- To want humanity.
tions of Europe to the American strand.”

Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683) In the chapter on words about entertainment,
he comments that “it is a strange truth that a
As the 1600s wore on into the 1700s, religious man shall generally find more free entertain-
dogmatism gradually dwindled, despite sporadic, ment and refreshing among these barbarians,
harsh Puritan efforts to stem the tide of toler- than amongst thousands that call themselves
ance. The minister Roger Williams suffered for Christians.”
his own views on religion. An English-born son of
a tailor, he was banished from Massachusetts in Williams’s life is uniquely inspiring. On a visit
the middle of New England’s ferocious winter in to England during the bloody Civil War there, he
1635. Secretly warned by Governor John Win- drew upon his survival in frigid New England to
throp of Massachusetts, he survived only by living organize firewood deliveries to the poor of
with Indians; in 1636, he established a new colony London during the winter, after their supply of
at Rhode Island that would welcome persons of coal had been cut off. He wrote lively defenses
different religions. of religious toleration not only for different
Christian sects, but also for non-Christians.
A graduate of Cambridge University (England), “It is the will and command of God, that...a per-
he retained sympathy for working people and mission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or
diverse views. His ideas were ahead of his time. Antichristian consciences and worships, be grant-
He was an early critic of imperialism, insisting ed to all men, in all nations...,” he wrote in The
that European kings had no right to grant land Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of
charters because American land belonged to the Conscience (1644). The intercultural experience
Indians. Williams also believe in the separation

10

of living among gracious and humane JONATHAN EDWARDS their ideas. He writes simply of his
Indians undoubtedly accounts for desire to “feel and understand
much of his wisdom. Engraving © The Bettmann their life, and the Spirit they live
Archive in.” Woolman’s justice-loving spirit
Influence was two-way in the naturally turns to social criticism:
colonies. For example, John Eliot “I perceived that many white
translated the Bible into Narra- People do often sell Rum to the
gansett. Some Indians converted to Indians, which, I believe, is a great
Christianity. Even today, the Native Evil.”
American church is a mixture of
Christianity and Indian traditional Woolman was also one of
belief. the first antislavery writ-
ers, publishing two es-
The spirit of toleration and reli- says, “Some Considerations on the
gious freedom that gradually grew Keeping of Negroes,” in 1754 and
in the American colonies was first 1762. An ardent humanitarian, he
established in Rhode Island and followed a path of “passive obedi-
Pennsylvania, home of the Quakers. ence” to authorities and laws he
The humane and tolerant Quakers, found unjust, prefiguring Henry
or “Friends,” as they were known, David Thoreau’s celebrated essay,
believed in the sacredness of the “Civil Disobedience” (1849), by
individual conscience as the foun- generations.
tainhead of social order and moral-
ity. The fundamental Quaker belief Jonathan Edwards
in universal love and brotherhood (1703-1758)
made them deeply democratic and
opposed to dogmatic religious au- The antithesis of John Woolman
thority. Driven out of strict Massa- is Jonathan Edwards, who was born
chusetts, which feared their influ- only 17 years before the Quaker
ence, they established a very suc- notable. Woolman had little formal
cessful colony, Pennsylvania, under schooling; Edwards was highly edu-
William Penn in 1681. cated. Woolman followed his inner
light; Edwards was devoted to the
John Woolman (1720-1772) law and authority. Both men were
fine writers, but they revealed
The best-known Quaker work is opposite poles of the colonial reli-
the long Journal (1774) of John gious experience.
Woolman, documenting his inner
life in a pure, heartfelt style of great Edwards was molded by his
sweetness that has drawn praise extreme sense of duty and by the
from many American and English rigid Puritan environment, which
writers. This remarkable man left conspired to make him defend
his comfortable home in town to strict and gloomy Calvinism from
sojourn with the Indians in the wild the forces of liberalism springing
interior because he thought he up around him. He is best known
might learn from them and share for his frightening, powerful ser-

11

mon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” ness was rare — instead we hear of such plea-
(1741): sures as horseback riding and hunting. The
church was the focus of a genteel social life, not
[I]f God should let you go, you would imme- a forum for minute examinations of conscience.
diately sink, and sinfully descend, and
plunge into the bottomless gulf...The God William Byrd (1674-1744)
that holds you over the pit of hell, much as
one holds a spider or some loathsome Southern culture naturally revolved around the
insect over the fire, abhors you, and is ideal of the gentleman. A Renaissance man
dreadfully provoked....he looks upon you as equally good at managing a farm and reading clas-
worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the sical Greek, he had the power of a feudal lord.
bottomless gulf.
William Byrd describes the gracious way of life
Edwards’s sermons had enormous impact, at his plantation, Westover, in his famous letter
sending whole congregations into hysterical fits of 1726 to his English friend Charles Boyle, Earl
of weeping. In the long run, though, their of Orrery:
grotesque harshness alienated people from the
Calvinism that Edwards valiantly defended. Besides the advantages of pure air, we
Edwards’s dogmatic, medieval sermons no abound in all kinds of provisions without
longer fit the experiences of relatively peaceful, expense (I mean we who have plantations).
prosperous 18th-century colonists. After Ed- I have a large family of my own, and my doors
wards, fresh, liberal currents of tolerance gath- are open to everybody, yet I have no bills to
ered force. pay, and half-a-crown will rest undisturbed
in my pockets for many moons altogether.
LITERATURE IN THE SOUTHERN AND
MIDDLE COLONIES Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flock
and herds, my bondmen and bondwomen,
Pre-revolutionary southern literature was and every sort of trade amongst my own ser-
aristocratic and secular, reflecting the vants, so that I live in a kind of independence
dominant social and economic systems of on everyone but Providence.
the southern plantations. Early English immi-
grants were drawn to the southern colonies William Byrd epitomizes the spirit of the
because of economic opportunity rather than southern colonial gentry. The heir to 1,040
religious freedom. hectares, which he enlarged to 7,160 hectares, he
was a merchant, trader, and planter. His library of
Although many southerners were poor farm- 3,600 books was the largest in the South. He was
ers or tradespeople living not much better than born with a lively intelligence that his father aug-
slaves, the southern literate upper class was mented by sending him to excellent schools in
shaped by the classical, Old World ideal of a England and Holland. He visited the French
noble landed gentry made possible by slavery. Court, became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and
The institution released wealthy southern whites was friendly with some of the leading English
from manual labor, afforded them leisure, and writers of his day, particularly William Wycherley
made the dream of an aristocratic life in the and William Congreve. His London diaries are the
American wilderness possible. The Puritan opposite of those of the New England Puritans,
emphasis on hard work, education, and earnest- full of fancy dinners, glittering parties, and wom-
anizing, with little introspective soul-searching.

12

Byrd is best known today for his lively History the author, an Englishman named Ebenezer
of the Dividing Line, a diary of a 1729 trip of some Cook, had unsuccessfully tried his hand as a
weeks and 960 kilometers into the interior to tobacco merchant. Cook exposed the crude ways
survey the line dividing the neighboring colonies of the colony with high-spirited humor, and
of Virginia and North Carolina. The quick impres- accused the colonists of cheating him. The poem
sions that vast wilderness, Indians, half-savage concludes with an exaggerated curse: “May
whites, wild beasts, and every sort of difficulty wrath divine then lay those regions waste /
made on this civilized gentleman form a uniquely Where no man’s faithful nor a woman chaste.”
American and very southern book. He ridicules
the first Virginia colonists, “about a hundred In general, the colonial South may fairly be
men, most of them reprobates of good families,” linked with a light, worldly, informative, and real-
and jokes that at Jamestown, “like true istic literary tradition. Imitative of English liter-
Englishmen, they built a church that cost no ary fashions, the southerners attained imagina-
more than fifty pounds, and a tavern that cost five tive heights in witty, precise observations of dis-
hundred.” Byrd’s writings are fine examples of tinctive New World conditions.
the keen interest southerners took in the mate-
rial world: the land, Indians, plants, animals, and Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa)
settlers. (c. 1745-c. 1797)

Robert Beverley (c. 1673-1722) Important black writers like Olaudah Equiano
and Jupiter Hammon emerged during the colo-
Robert Beverley, another wealthy planter nial period. Equiano, an Ibo from Niger (West
and author of The History and Present Africa), was the first black in America to write an
State of Virginia (1705, 1722) records autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the
the history of the Virginia colony in a humane and Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the
vigorous style. Like Byrd, he admired the Indians African (1789). In the book — an early example
and remarked on the strange European supersti- of the slave narrative genre — Equiano gives an
tions about Virginia — for example, the belief account of his native land and the horrors and
“that the country turns all people black who go cruelties of his captivity and enslavement in
there.” He noted the great hospitality of south- the West Indies. Equiano, who converted to
erners, a trait maintained today. Christianity, movingly laments his cruel “un-
Christian” treatment by Christians — a senti-
Humorous satire — a literary work in which ment many African-Americans would voice in
human vice or folly is attacked through irony, centuries to come.
derision, or wit — appears frequently in the
colonial South. A group of irritated settlers lam- Jupiter Hammon (c. 1720-c. 1800)
pooned Georgia’s philanthropic founder, General
James Oglethorpe, in a tract entitled A True and The black American poet Jupiter Hammon, a
Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia
(1741). They pretended to praise him for keeping slave on Long Island, New York, is remembered
them so poor and overworked that they had to
develop “the valuable virtue of humility” and for his religious poems as well as for An Address
shun “the anxieties of any further ambition.”
to the Negroes of the State of New York (1787), in
The rowdy, satirical poem “The Sotweed
Factor” satirizes the colony of Maryland, where which he advocated freeing children of slaves

instead of condemning them to hereditary

slavery. His poem “An Evening Thought” was the

first poem published by a black male in

America. ■

13

CHAPTER Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar
Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.
2 America’s literary independence was slowed by a
lingering identification with England, an exces-
DEMOCRATIC ORIGINS sive imitation of English or classical literary mod-
AND REVOLUTIONARY els, and difficult economic and political condi-
tions that hampered publishing.
WRITERS, 1776-1820
Revolutionary writers, despite their genuine
The hard-fought American Revolution patriotism, were of necessity self-conscious, and
against Britain (1775-1783) was the first they could never find roots in their American
modern war of liberation against a colonial sensibilities. Colonial writers of the revolution-
power. The triumph of American independence ary generation had been born English, had grown
seemed to many at the time a divine sign that to maturity as English citizens, and had cultivated
America and her people were destined for great- English modes of thought and English fashions in
ness. Military victory fanned nationalistic hopes dress and behavior. Their parents and grandpar-
for a great new literature. Yet with the excep- ents were English (or European), as were all
tion of outstanding political writing, few works their friends. Added to this, American awareness
of note appeared during or soon after the of literary fashion still lagged behind the English,
Revolution. and this time lag intensified American imitation.
Fifty years after their fame in England, English
American books were harshly reviewed in neoclassic writers such as Joseph Addison,
England. Americans were painfully aware of their Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope,
excessive dependence on English literary mod- Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson were still
els. The search for a native literature became a eagerly imitated in America.
national obsession. As one American magazine
editor wrote, around 1816, “Dependence is a Moreover, the heady challenges of building a
state of degradation fraught with disgrace, and to new nation attracted talented and educated peo-
be dependent on a foreign mind for what we can ple to politics, law, and diplomacy. These pursuits
ourselves produce is to add to the crime of indo- brought honor, glory, and financial security.
lence the weakness of stupidity.” Writing, on the other hand, did not pay. Early
American writers, now separated from England,
Cultural revolutions, unlike military revolu- effectively had no modern publishers, no audi-
tions, cannot be successfully imposed but must ence, and no adequate legal protection. Edito-
grow from the soil of shared experience. rial assistance, distribution, and publicity were
Revolutions are expressions of the heart of the rudimentary.
people; they grow gradually out of new sensibili-
ties and wealth of experience. It would take 50 Until 1825, most American authors paid print-
years of accumulated history for America to earn ers to publish their work. Obviously only the
its cultural independence and to produce the leisured and independently wealthy, like Wash-
first great generation of American writers: ington Irving and the New York Knickerbocker
Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, group, or the group of Connecticut poets knows
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, as the Hartford Wits, could afford to indulge
their interest in writing. The exception, Benjamin
Franklin, though from a poor family, was a print-
er by trade and could publish his own work.

14

Charles Brockden Brown was NOAH WEBSTER Carey, an important American pub-
more typical. The author of sever- lisher, paid a London agent — a
al interesting Gothic romances, Engraving © The Bettmann sort of literary spy — to send
Brown was the first American Archive copies of unbound pages, or even
author to attempt to live from his proofs, to him in fast ships that
writing. But his short life ended in could sail to America in a month.
poverty. Carey’s men would sail out to meet
the incoming ships in the harbor
The lack of an audience was and speed the pirated books into
another problem. The small culti- print using typesetters who divided
vated audience in America wanted the book into sections and worked
well-known European authors, in shifts around the clock. Such a
partly out of the exaggerated pirated English book could be re-
respect with which former colonies printed in a day and placed on the
regarded their previous rulers. shelves for sale in American book-
This preference for English works stores almost as fast as in England.
was not entirely unreasonable, con-
sidering the inferiority of American Because imported authorized
output, but it worsened the situa- editions were more expensive and
tion by depriving American authors could not compete with pirated
of an audience. Only journalism ones, the copyright situation dam-
offered financial remuneration, but aged foreign authors such as Sir
the mass audience wanted light, Walter Scott and Charles Dickens,
undemanding verse and short topi- along with American authors. But
cal essays — not long or experi- at least the foreign authors had
mental work. already been paid by their original
publishers and were already well
The absence of adequate copy- known. Americans such as James
right laws was perhaps the clearest Fenimore Cooper not only failed to
cause of literary stagnation. Am- receive adequate payment, but they
erican printers pirating English had to suffer seeing their works
best-sellers understandably were pirated under their noses. Coo-
unwilling to pay an American author per’s first successful book, The Spy
for unknown material. The unau- (1821), was pirated by four differ-
thorized reprinting of foreign ent printers within a month of its
books was originally seen as a ser- appearance.
vice to the colonies as well as a
source of profit for printers like Ironically, the copyright law of
Franklin, who reprinted works of 1790, which allowed pirating, was
the classics and great European nationalistic in intent. Drafted by
books to educate the American Noah Webster, the great lexicogra-
public. pher who later compiled an Am-
erican dictionary, the law protected
Printers everywhere in America only the work of American authors;
followed his lead. There are notori- it was felt that English writers
ous examples of pirating. Matthew

15

should look out for themselves. ual. Self-educated but well-read in John Locke,
Bad as the law was, none of the early publish- Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and other
Enlightenment writers, Franklin learned from
ers were willing to have it changed because it them to apply reason to his own life and to break
proved profitable for them. Piracy starved the with tradition — in particular the old-fashioned
first generation of revolutionary American writ- Puritan tradition — when it threatened to
ers; not surprisingly, the generation after them smother his ideals.
produced even less work of merit. The high point
of piracy, in 1815, corresponds with the low point While a youth, Franklin taught himself lan-
of American writing. Nevertheless, the cheap and guages, read widely, and practiced writing for the
plentiful supply of pirated foreign books and public. When he moved from Boston to
classics in the first 50 years of the new country Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Franklin already had
did educate Americans, including the first great the kind of education associated with the upper
writers, who began to make their appearance classes. He also had the Puritan capacity for
around 1825. hard, careful work, constant self-scrutiny, and
the desire to better himself. These qualities
THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT steadily propelled him to wealth, respectability,
and honor. Never selfish, Franklin tried to help
The 18th-century American Enlightenment other ordinary people become successful by
was a movement marked by an emphasis on sharing his insights and initiating a characteristi-
rationality rather than tradition, scientif- cally American genre — the self-help book.
ic inquiry instead of unquestioning religious
dogma, and representative government in place Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, begun in
of monarchy. Enlightenment thinkers and writers 1732 and published for many years, made
were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and Franklin prosperous and well-known throughout
equality as the natural rights of man. the colonies. In this annual book of useful
encouragement, advice, and factual information,
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) amusing characters such as old Father Abraham
and Poor Richard exhort the reader in pithy,
Benjamin Franklin, whom the Scottish philoso- memorable sayings. In “The Way to Wealth,”
pher David Hume called America’s “first great which originally appeared in the Almanack,
man of letters,” embodied the Enlightenment Father Abraham, “a plain clean old Man, with
ideal of humane rationality. Practical yet idealis- white Locks,” quotes Poor Richard at length. “A
tic, hard-working and enormously successful, Word to the Wise is enough,” he says. “God helps
Franklin recorded his early life in his famous them that help themselves.” “Early to Bed, and
Autobiography. Writer, printer, publisher, scien- early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy, and
tist, philanthropist, and diplomat, he was the wise.” Poor Richard is a psychologist (“Industry
most famous and respected private figure of his pays Debts, while Despair encreaseth them”),
time. He was the first great self-made man in and he always counsels hard work (“Diligence is
America, a poor democrat born in an aristocratic the Mother of Good Luck”). Do not be lazy, he
age that his fine example helped to liberalize. advises, for “One To-day is worth two tomorrow.”
Sometimes he creates anecdotes to illustrate his
Franklin was a second-generation immigrant. points: “A little Neglect may breed great Mis-
His Puritan father, a chandler (candle-maker), chief....For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for
came to Boston, Massachusetts, from England in want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want
1683. In many ways Franklin’s life illustrates the
impact of the Enlightenment on a gifted individ-

16

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Engraving courtesy Library of Congress
17

of a Horse the Rider was lost, being overtaken which the U.S. Constitution was drafted. In his
and slain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about later years, he was president of an antislavery
a Horse-shoe Nail.” Franklin was a genius at association. One of his last efforts was to pro-
compressing a moral point: “What maintains one mote universal public education.
Vice, would bring up two Children.” “A small leak
will sink a great Ship.” “Fools make Feasts, and Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813)
wise Men eat them.”
Another Enlightenment figure is Hector St.
Franklin’s Autobiography is, in part, another John de Crèvecoeur, whose Letters from an
self-help book. Written to advise his son, it cov- American Farmer (1782) gave Europeans a glow-
ers only the early years. The most famous sec- ing idea of opportunities for peace, wealth, and
tion describes his scientific scheme of self- pride in America. Neither an American nor a
improvement. Franklin lists 13 virtues: temper- farmer, but a French aristocrat who owned a
ance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, indus- plantation outside New York City before the
try, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, Revolution, Crèvecoeur enthusiastically praised
tranquility, chastity, and humility. He elaborates the colonies for their industry, tolerance, and
on each with a maxim; for example, the temper- growing prosperity in 12 letters that depict
ance maxim is “Eat not to Dullness. Drink not to America as an agrarian paradise — a vision
Elevation.” A pragmatic scientist, Franklin put that would inspire Thomas Jefferson, Ralph
the idea of perfectibility to the test, using him- Waldo Emerson, and many other writers up to
self as the experimental subject. the present.

To establish good habits, Franklin invented a Crèvecoeur was the earliest European to
reusable calendrical record book in which he develop a considered view of America and the
worked on one virtue each week, recording each new American character. The first to exploit the
lapse with a black spot. His theory prefigures “melting pot” image of America, in a famous pas-
psychological behaviorism, while his systematic sage he asks:
method of notation anticipates modern behavior
modification. The project of self-improvement What then is the American, this new man?
blends the Enlightenment belief in perfectibility He is either a European, or the descendant
with the Puritan habit of moral self-scrutiny. of a European, hence that strange mixture
of blood, which you will find in no other
Franklin saw early that writing could best country. I could point out to you a family
advance his ideas, and he therefore delib- whose grandfather was an Englishman,
erately perfected his supple prose style, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a
not as an end in itself but as a tool. “Write with French woman, and whose present four
the learned. Pronounce with the vulgar,” he sons have now four wives of different
advised. A scientist, he followed the Royal (sci- nations....Here individuals of all nations are
entific) Society’s 1667 advice to use “a close, melted into a new race of men, whose labors
naked, natural way of speaking; positive expres- and posterity will one day cause changes in
sions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing the world.
all things as near the mathematical plainness as
they can.”

Despite his prosperity and fame, Franklin
never lost his democratic sensibility, and he was
an important figure at the 1787 convention at

18

THE POLITICAL PAMPHLET: THOMAS PAINE English might be a second lan-
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) guage. Thomas Jefferson’s original
Portrait courtesy Library of draft of the Declaration of In-
The passion of Revolutionary lit- Congress dependence is clear and logical,
erature is found in pamphlets, the but his committee’s modifications
most popular form of political liter- made it even simpler. The Fed-
ature of the day. Over 2,000 pam- eralist Papers, written in support of
phlets were published during the the Constitution, are also lucid,
Revolution. The pamphlets thrilled logical arguments, suitable for
patriots and threatened loyalists; debate in a democratic nation.
they filled the role of drama, as they
were often read aloud in public to NEOCLASSISM: EPIC, MOCK
excite audiences. American sol- EPIC, AND SATIRE
diers read them aloud in their
camps; British Loyalists threw them Unfortunately, “literary” writing
into public bonfires. was not as simple and direct as
political writing. When trying to
Thomas Paine’s pamphlet write poetry, most educated au-
Common Sense sold over thors stumbled into the pitfall of
100,000 copies in the first elegant neoclassicism. The epic, in
three months of its publication. It is particular, exercised a fatal attrac-
still rousing today. “The cause of tion. American literary patriots felt
America is in a great measure the sure that the great American Rev-
cause of all mankind,” Paine wrote, olution naturally would find ex-
voicing the idea of American excep- pression in the epic — a long, dra-
tionalism still strong in the United matic narrative poem in elevated
States — that in some fundamental language, celebrating the feats of a
sense, since America is a democra- legendary hero.
tic experiment and a country theo-
retically open to all immigrants, the Many writers tried but none suc-
fate of America foreshadows the ceeded. Timothy Dwight, (1752-
fate of humanity at large. 1817), one of the group of writers
known as the Hartford Wits, is an
Political writings in a democracy example. Dwight, who eventually
had to be clear to appeal to the vot- became the president of Yale
ers. And to have informed voters, University, based his epic, The
universal education was promoted Conquest of Canaan (1785), on the
by many of the founding fathers. Biblical story of Joshua’s struggle
One indication of the vigorous, if to enter the Promised Land.
simple, literary life was the prolifer- Dwight cast General Washington,
ation of newspapers. More newspa- commander of the American army
pers were read in America during and later the first president of the
the Revolution than anywhere else United States, as Joshua in his al-
in the world. Immigration also man- legory and borrowed the couplet
dated a simple style. Clarity was form that Alexander Pope used to
vital to a newcomer, for whom

19

translate Homer. Dwight’s epic was as boring as in installments from 1792 to 1815, memorably
it was ambitious. English critics demolished it; lampoons the excesses of the age. Brackenridge
even Dwight’s friends, such as John Trumbull (1748-1816), a Scottish immigrant raised on the
(1750-1831), remained unenthusiastic. So much American frontier, based his huge, picaresque
thunder and lightning raged in the melodramatic novel on Don Quixote; it describes the mis-
battle scenes that Trumbull proposed that the adventures of Captain Farrago and his stupid,
epic be provided with lightning rods. brutal, yet appealingly human, servant Teague
O’Regan.
Not surprisingly, satirical poetry fared much
better than serious verse. The mock epic POET OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION:
genre encouraged American poets to use Philip Freneau (1752-1832)
their natural voices and did not lure them into a
bog of pretentious and predictable patriotic sen- One poet, Philip Freneau, incorporated the
timents and faceless conventional poetic epi- new stirrings of European Romanticism and es-
thets out of the Greek poet Homer and the caped the imitativeness and vague universality of
Roman poet Virgil by way of the English poets. the Hartford Wits. The key to both his success
and his failure was his passionately democratic
In mock epics like John Trumbull’s good- spirit combined with an inflexible temper.
humored M’Fingal (1776-1782), stylized emo-
tions and conventional turns of phrase are The Hartford Wits, all of them undoubted
ammunition for good satire, and the bombastic patriots, reflected the general cultural conser-
oratory of the Revolution is itself ridiculed. vatism of the educated classes. Freneau set him-
Modeled on the British poet Samuel Butler’s self against this holdover of old Tory attitudes,
Hudibras, the mock epic derides a Tory, M’Fingal. complaining of “the writings of an aristocratic,
It is often pithy, as when noting of condemned speculating faction at Hartford, in favor of
criminals facing hanging: monarchy and titular distinctions.” Although
Freneau received a fine education and was as
No man e’er felt the halter draw. well acquainted with the classics as any Hartford
With good opinion of the law. Wit, he embraced liberal and democratic causes.

M’Fingal went into over 30 editions, was From a Huguenot (radical French Protestant)
reprinted for a half-century, and was appreciated background, Freneau fought as a militiaman dur-
in England as well as America. Satire appealed to ing the Revolutionary War. In 1780, he was cap-
Revolutionary audiences partly because it con- tured and imprisoned in two British ships, where
tained social comment and criticism, and politi- he almost died before his family managed to get
cal topics and social problems were the main him released. His poem “The British Prison
subjects of the day. The first American comedy to Ship” is a bitter condemnation of the cruelties of
be performed, The Contrast (produced 1787) by the British, who wished “to stain the world with
Royall Tyler (1757-1826), humorously contrasts gore.” This piece and other revolutionary works,
Colonel Manly, an American officer, with Dimple, including “Eutaw Springs,” “American Liberty,”
who imitates English fashions. Naturally, Dimple “A Political Litany,” “A Midnight Consultation,”
is made to look ridiculous. The play introduces and “George the Third’s Soliloquy,” brought him
the first Yankee character, Jonathan. fame as the “Poet of the American Revolution.”

Another satirical work, the novel Modern Freneau edited a number of journals during
Chivalry, published by Hugh Henry Brackenridge his life, always mindful of the great cause of
democracy. When Thomas Jefferson helped him

20

establish the militant, anti-Fed- Webster (1758-1843) devised an

eralist National Gazette in 1791, American Dictionary, as well as an

Freneau became the first powerful, he 18th- important reader and speller for
crusading newspaper editor in the schools. His Spelling Book sold
America, and the literary predeces- more than 100 million copies over
sor of William Cullen Bryant, the years. Updated Webster’s dic-
tionaries are still standard to-
TWilliam Lloyd Garrison, and H.L. day. The American Geography, by
Mencken. centry American

As a poet and editor, Freneau Enlightenment was Jedidiah Morse, another landmark
adhered to his democratic ideals. reference work, promoted knowl-
His popular poems, published in a movement edge of the vast and expanding
American land itself. Some of the
newspapers for the average reader, marked by an

regularly celebrated American sub- emphasis on most interesting, if nonliterary,

jects. “The Virtue of Tobacco” con- rationality rather writings of the period are the jour-
cerns the indigenous plant, a main- than tradition, nals of frontiersmen and explorers
stay of the southern economy, while such as Meriwether Lewis (1774-
“The Jug of Rum” celebrates the scientific inquiry 1809) and Zebulon Pike (1779-
1813), who wrote accounts of ex-
alcoholic drink of the West Indies, instead of

a crucial commodity of early unquestioning peditions across the Louisiana

American trade and a major New religious dogma, Territory, the vast portion of the
World export. Common American North American continent that
characters lived in “The Pilot of and representative Thomas Jefferson purchased from
Napoleon in 1803.
Hatteras,” as well as in poems government in

about quack doctors and bombastic place of monarchy.

evangelists. Enlightenment WRITERS OF FICTION

Tgenuine democracy, but he could writers were devot-
Freneau commanded a natural thinkers and he first important fiction
and colloquial style appropriate to a writers widely recognized to-
day, Charles Brockden Brown,

also rise to refined neoclassic lyri- ed to the ideals Washington Irving, and James

cism in often-anthologized works of justice, liberty, Fenimore Cooper, used American
such as “The Wild Honey Suckle” and equality as subjects, historical perspectives,
(1786), which evokes a sweet- themes of change, and nostalgic
smelling native shrub. Not until the the natural rights tones. They wrote in many prose
genres, initiated new forms, and
“American Renaissance” that be- of man.

gan in the 1820s would American found new ways to make a living

poetry surpass the heights that through literature. With them,

Freneau had scaled 40 years earlier. American literature began to be

Additional groundwork for later read and appreciated in the United

literary achievement was laid dur- States and abroad.

ing the early years. Nationalism

inspired publications in many

fields, leading to a new apprecia-

tion of things American. Noah

21

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) Hawthorne. Despite his talent, he probably would
not have become a full-time professional writer,
Already mentioned as the first professional given the lack of financial rewards, if a series of
American writer, Charles Brockden Brown was fortuitous incidents had not thrust writing as a
inspired by the English writers Mrs. Radcliffe profession upon him. Through friends, he was
and English William Godwin. (Radcliffe was able to publish his Sketch Book (1819-1820)
known for her terrifying Gothic novels; a novelist simultaneously in England and America, obtain-
and social reformer, Godwin was the father of ing copyrights and payment in both countries.
Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein and mar-
ried English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.) The Sketch Book of Geoffrye Crayon (Irving’s
pseudonym) contains his two best remembered
Driven by poverty, Brown hastily penned four stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of
haunting novels in two years: Wieland (1798), Sleepy Hollow.” “Sketch” aptly describes Irving’s
Arthur Mervyn (1799), Ormond (1799), and Edgar delicate, elegant, yet seemingly casual style, and
Huntley (1799). In them, he developed the genre “crayon” suggests his ability as a colorist or
of American Gothic. The Gothic novel was a pop- creator of rich, nuanced tones and emotional
ular genre of the day featuring exotic and wild effects. In the Sketch Book, Irving transforms
settings, disturbing psychological depth, and the Catskill mountains along the Hudson River
much suspense. Trappings included ruined cas- north of New York City into a fabulous, magical
tles or abbeys, ghosts, mysterious secrets, region.
threatening figures, and solitary maidens who
survive by their wits and spiritual strength. At American readers gratefully accepted Irving’s
their best, such novels offer tremendous sus- imagined “history” of the Catskills, despite the
pense and hints of magic, along with profound fact (unknown to them) that he had adapted his
explorations of the human soul in extremity. stories from a German source. Irving gave Am-
Critics suggest that Brown’s Gothic sensibility erica something it badly needed in the brash,
expresses deep anxieties about the inadequate materialistic early years: an imaginative way of
social institutions of the new nation. relating to the new land.

Brown used distinctively American settings. A No writer was as successful as Irving at hu-
man of ideas, he dramatized scientific theories, manizing the land, endowing it with a name and a
developed a personal theory of fiction, and face and a set of legends. The story of “Rip Van
championed high literary standards despite per- Winkle,” who slept for 20 years, waking to find
sonal poverty. Though flawed, his works are dark- the colonies had become independent, eventual-
ly powerful. Increasingly, he is seen as the pre- ly became folklore. It was adapted for the stage,
cursor of romantic writers like Edgar Allan Poe, went into the oral tradition, and was gradually
Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He accepted as authentic American legend by gener-
expresses subconscious fears that the outward- ations of Americans.
ly optimistic Enlightenment period drove under-
ground. Irving discovered and helped satisfy the raw
new nation’s sense of history. His numerous
Washington Irving (1789-1859) works may be seen as his devoted attempts to
build the new nation’s soul by recreating history
The youngest of 11 children born to a well-to- and giving it living, breathing, imaginative life. For
do New York merchant family, Washington Irving subjects, he chose the most dramatic aspects of
became a cultural and diplomatic ambassador to American history: the discovery of the New
Europe, like Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel World, the first president and national hero, and

22

the westward exploration. His earli- JAMES FENIMORE cultures. The son of a Quaker fam-
est work was a sparkling, satirical COOPER ily, he grew up on his father’s
History of New York (1809) under remote estate at Otsego Lake (now
the Dutch, ostensibly written by Photo courtesy Library of Cooperstown) in central New York
Diedrich Knickerbocker (hence the Congress State. Although this area was rela-
name of Irving’s friends and New tively peaceful during Cooper’s
York writers of the day, the boyhood, it had once been the
“Knickerbocker School”). scene of an Indian massacre. Young
Fenimore Cooper grew up in an
James Fenimore Cooper almost feudal environment. His
(1789-1851) father, Judge Cooper, was a
landowner and leader. Cooper saw
James Fenimore Cooper, like frontiersmen and Indians at Ot-
Irving, evoked a sense of the past sego Lake as a boy; in later life, bold
and gave it a local habitation and a white settlers intruded on his land.
name. In Cooper, though, one finds
the powerful myth of a golden age Natty Bumppo, Cooper’s re-
and the poignance of its loss. While nowned literary character, embod-
Irving and other American writers ies his vision of the frontiersman as
before and after him scoured a gentleman, a Jeffersonian “natur-
Europe in search of its legends, al aristocrat.” Early in 1823, in The
castles, and great themes, Cooper Pioneers, Cooper had begun to dis-
grasped the essential myth of cover Bumppo. Natty is the first
America: that it was timeless, like famous frontiersman in American
the wilderness. American history literature and the literary forerun-
was a trespass on the eternal; ner of countless cowboy and back-
European history in America was a woods heroes. He is the idealized,
reenactment of the fall in the upright individualist who is better
Garden of Eden. The cyclical realm than the society he protects. Poor
of nature was glimpsed only in the and isolated, yet pure, he is a
act of destroying it: The wilderness touchstone for ethical values and
disappeared in front of American prefigures Herman Melville’s Billy
eyes, vanishing before the oncom- Budd and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn.
ing pioneers like a mirage. This is
Cooper’s basic tragic vision of the Based in part on the real life of
ironic destruction of the wilder- American pioneer Daniel Boone —
ness, the new Eden that had at- who was a Quaker like Cooper —
tracted the colonists in the first Natty Bumppo, an outstanding
place. woodsman like Boone, was a peace-
ful man adopted by an Indian tribe.
Personal experience enabled Both Boone and the fictional
Cooper to write vividly of the trans- Bumppo loved nature and freedom.
formation of the wilderness and of They constantly kept moving west
other subjects such as the sea and to escape the oncoming settlers
the clash of peoples from different they had guided into the wilder-

23

ness, and they became legends in and society, nature and culture,
their own lifetimes. Natty is also spirituality and organized religion.
chaste, high-minded, and deeply In Cooper, the natural world and
spiritual: He is the Christian knight the Indian are fundamentally good
of medieval romances transposed — as is the highly civilized realm
to the virgin forest and rocky soil of associated with his most cultured
America. characters. Intermediate charac-
ters are often suspect, especially
The unifying thread of the five greedy, poor white settlers who are
novels collectively known as the too uneducated or unrefined to
Leather-Stocking Tales is the life appreciate nature or culture. Like
of Natty Bumppo. Cooper’s finest Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster,
achievement, they constitute a vast Herman Melville, and other sensi-
prose epic with the North American tive observers of widely varied cul-
continent as setting, Indian tribes tures interacting with each other,
as characters, and great wars and Cooper was a cultural relativist. He
westward migration as social back- understood that no culture had a
ground. The novels bring to life monopoly on virtue or refinement.
frontier America from 1740 to 1804.
Cooper accepted the American
Cooper’s novels portray the suc- condition while Irving did not. Ir-
cessive waves of the frontier set- ving addressed the American set-
tlement: the original wilderness in- ting as a European might have —
habited by Indians; the arrival of the by importing and adapting Eu-
first whites as scouts, soldiers, ropean legends, culture, and histo-
traders, and frontiersmen; the ry. Cooper took the process a step
coming of the poor, rough settler farther. He created American set-
families; and the final arrival of the tings and new, distinctively Amer-
middle class, bringing the first pro- ican characters and themes. He
fessionals — the judge, the physi- was the first to sound the recurring
cian, and the banker. Each incoming tragic note in American fiction.
wave displaced the earlier: Whites
displaced the Indians, who retreat- PHILLIS WHEATLEY WOMEN AND MINORITIES
ed westward; the “civilized” mid-
dle classes who erected schools, Engraving © The Bettmann Although the colonial period
churches, and jails displaced the Archive produced several women
lower-class individualistic frontier writers of note, the revolu-
folk, who moved further west, in tionary era did not further the work
turn displacing the Indians who had of women and minorities, despite
preceded them. Cooper evokes the the many schools, magazines,
endless, inevitable wave of settlers, newspapers, and literary clubs that
seeing not only the gains but the were springing up. Colonial women
losses. such as Anne Bradstreet, Anne
Hutchinson, Ann Cotton, and Sarah
Cooper’s novels reveal a deep Kemble Knight exerted consider-
tension between the lone individual

24

able social and literary influence in spite of prim- ’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land
itive conditions and dangers; of the 18 women Taught my benighted soul to understand
who came to America on the ship Mayflower in That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too;
1620, only four survived the first year. When every Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
able-bodied person counted and conditions were Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
fluid, innate talent could find expression. But as “Their colour is a diabolic dye.”
cultural institutions became formalized in the Remember, Christians, negroes, black as Cain,
new republic, women and minorities gradually May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
were excluded from them.
Other Women Writers
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784)
A number of accomplished Revolutionary-era
Given the hardships of life in early America, it
is ironic that some of the best poetry of the peri- women writers have been rediscovered by femi-
od was written by an exceptional slave woman.
The first African-American author of importance nist scholars. Susanna Rowson (c. 1762-1824)
in the United States, Phillis Wheatley was born in
Africa and brought to Boston, Massachusetts, was one of America’s first professional novelists.
when she was about seven, where she was pur-
chased by the pious and wealthy tailor John Her seven novels included the best-selling
Wheatley to be a companion for his wife. The
Wheatleys recognized Phillis’s remarkable intel- seduction story Charlotte Temple (1791). She
ligence and, with the help of their daughter, Mary,
Phillis learned to read and write. treats feminist and abolitionist themes and

Wheatley’s poetic themes are religious, and depicts American Indians with respect.
her style, like that of Philip Freneau, is neoclas-
sical. Among her best-known poems are “To S.M., Another long-forgotten novelist was Hannah
a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works,” a Foster (1758-1840), whose best-selling
poem of praise and encouragement for another novel The Coquette (1797) was about a
talented black, and a short poem showing her young woman torn between virtue and tempta-
strong religious sensitivity filtered through her
experience of Christian conversion. This poem tion. Rejected by her sweetheart, a cold man of
unsettles some contemporary critics — whites
because they find it conventional, and blacks the church, she is seduced, abandoned, bears a
because the poem does not protest the immoral-
ity of slavery. Yet the work is a sincere expres- child, and dies alone.
sion; it confronts white racism and asserts spiri-
tual equality. Indeed, Wheatley was the first to Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) published
address such issues confidently in verse, as in
“On Being Brought from Africa to America”: under a man’s name to secure serious attention

for her works. Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814)

was a poet, historian, dramatist, satirist, and

patriot. She held pre-Revolutionary gatherings in

her home, attacked the British in her racy plays,

and wrote the only contemporary radical history

of the American revolution.

Letters between women such as Mercy Otis

Warren and Abigail Adams, and letters generally,

are important documents of the period. For

example, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband,

John Adams (later the second president of

the United States), in 1776 urging that women’s

independence be guaranteed in the future U.S.

constitution. ■

25

CHAPTER The development of the self became a major
theme; self-awareness, a primary method. If,
3 according to Romantic theory, self and nature
were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead
THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, end but a mode of knowledge opening up the uni-
verse. If one’s self were one with all humanity,
1820-1860: then the individual had a moral duty to reform
social inequalities and relieve human suffer-
ESSAYISTS AND POETS ing. The idea of “self” — which suggested self-
ishness to earlier generations — was redefined.
The Romantic movement, which originated New compound words with positive meanings
in Germany but quickly spread to England, emerged: “self-realization,” “self-expression,”
France, and beyond, reached America “self-reliance.”
around the year 1820, some 20 years after William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had As the unique, subjective self became impor-
revolutionized English poetry by publishing tant, so did the realm of psychology. Exceptional
Lyrical Ballads. In America as in Europe, fresh artistic effects and techniques were developed
new vision electrified artistic and intellectual cir- to evoke heightened psychological states. The
cles. Yet there was an important difference: Ro- “sublime” — an effect of beauty in grandeur
manticism in America coincided with the period (for example, a view from a mountaintop) —
of national expansion and the discovery of a dis- produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness,
tinctive American voice. The solidification of a and a power beyond human comprehension.
national identity and the surging idealism and
passion of Romanticism nurtured the master- Romanticism was affirmative and appropriate
pieces of “the American Renaissance.” for most American poets and creative essayists.
America’s vast mountains, deserts, and tropics
Romantic ideas centered around art as inspira- embodied the sublime. The Romantic spirit
tion, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of seemed particularly suited to American democ-
nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, racy: It stressed individualism, affirmed the value
rather than science, Romantics argued, could of the common person, and looked to the in-
best express universal truth. The Romantics spired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical
underscored the importance of expressive art values. Certainly the New England Transcenden-
for the individual and society. In his essay “The talists — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Poet” (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the Thoreau, and their associates — were inspired
most influential writer of the Romantic era, to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic
asserts: movement. In New England, Romanticism fell
upon fertile soil.
For all men live by truth, and stand in need
of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in TRANSCENDENTALISM
politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter
our painful secret. The man is only half him- The Transcendentalist movement was a reac-
self, the other half is his expression. tion against 18th-century rationalism and a mani-
festation of the general humanitarian trend of
19th-century thought. The movement was based
on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world
and God. The soul of each individual was thought

26

to be identical with the world — a RALPH ed with the town, but the locale also
microcosm of the world itself. The WALDO EMERSON attracted the novelist Nathaniel
doctrine of self-reliance and indi- Hawthorne, the feminist writer
vidualism developed through the Photo courtesy Margaret Fuller, the educator (and
belief in the identification of the National Portrait Gallery, father of novelist Louisa May Al-
individual soul with God. Smithsonian Institution cott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet
William Ellery Channing. The Tran-
Transcendentalism was intimate- scendental Club was loosely orga-
ly connected with Concord, a small nized in 1836 and included, at vari-
New England village 32 kilometers ous times, Emerson, Thoreau,
west of Boston. Concord was the Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott,
first inland settlement of the origi- Orestes Brownson (a leading min-
nal Massachusetts Bay Colony. ister), Theodore Parker (abolition-
Surrounded by forest, it was and ist and minister), and others.
remains a peaceful town close
enough to Boston’s lectures, book- The Transcendentalists published
stores, and colleges to be intense- a quarterly magazine, The Dial,
ly cultivated, but far enough away to which lasted four years and was
be serene. Concord was the site first edited by Margaret Fuller and
of the first battle of the Ameri- later by Emerson. Reform efforts
can Revolution, and Ralph Waldo engaged them as well as literature.
Emerson’s poem commemorating A number of Transcendentalists
the battle, “Concord Hymn,” has were abolitionists, and some were
one of the most famous opening involved in experimental utopian
stanzas in American literature: communities such as nearby Brook
Farm (described in Hawthorne’s
By the rude bridge that arched The Blithedale Romance) and
the flood Fruitlands.

Their flag to April’s breeze Unlike many European groups,
unfurled, the Transcendentalists never is-
sued a manifesto. They insisted on
Here once the embattled farmers individual differences — on the
stood unique viewpoint of the individual.
American Transcendental Romantics
And fired the shot heard round pushed radical individualism to the
the world. extreme. American writers often
saw themselves as lonely explorers
Concord was the first rural ar- outside society and convention.
tist’s colony, and the first place to The American hero — like Herman
offer a spiritual and cultural alter- Melville’s Captain Ahab, or Mark
native to American materialism. It Twain’s Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan
was a place of high-minded conver- Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym — typi-
sation and simple living (Emerson cally faced risk, or even certain
and Henry David Thoreau both had destruction, in the pursuit of meta-
vegetable gardens). Emerson, who
moved to Concord in 1834, and
Thoreau are most closely associat-

27

physical self-discovery. For the Romantic also enjoy an original relation to the uni-
American writer, nothing was a given. Literary verse? Why should not we have a poetry of
and social conventions, far from being helpful, insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
were dangerous. There was tremendous pres- revelation to us, and not the history of
sure to discover an authentic literary form, con- theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature,
tent, and voice — all at the same time. It is clear whose floods of life stream around and
from the many masterpieces produced in the through us, and invite us by the powers they
three decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861- supply, to action proportioned to nature, why
65) that American writers rose to the challenge. should we grope among the dry bones of the
past...? The sun shines today also. There is
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) more wool and flax in the fields. There are
new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of us demand our own works and laws and
his era, had a religious sense of mission. worship.
Although many accused him of subverting
Christianity, he explained that, for him “to be Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the
a good minister, it was necessary to leave the 16th-century French essayist Montaigne, and he
church.” The address he delivered in 1838 at his once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write
alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made a book like Montaigne’s, “full of fun, poetry, busi-
him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, ness, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut.” He
Emerson accused the church of acting “as if God complained that Alcott’s abstract style omitted
were dead” and of emphasizing dogma while sti- “the light that shines on a man’s hat, in a child’s
fling the spirit. spoon.”

Emerson’s philosophy has been called con- Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic ex-
tradictory, and it is true that he conscious- pression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the
ly avoided building a logical intellectual Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared lis-
system because such a rational system would tening to him with “going to heaven in a swing.”
have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and Much of his spiritual insight comes from his
flexibility. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson readings in Eastern religion, especially Hin-
remarks: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin duism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For
of little minds.” Yet he is remarkably consistent example, his poem “Brahma” relies on Hindu
in his call for the birth of American individualism sources to assert a cosmic order beyond the lim-
inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas — ited perception of mortals:
the need for a new national vision, the use of
personal experience, the notion of the cosmic If the red slayer think he slay
Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation — Or the slain think he is slain,
are suggested in his first publication, Nature They know not well the subtle ways
(1836). This essay opens: I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepul- Far or forgot to me is near
chres of the fathers. It writes biographies, Shadow and sunlight are the same;
histories, criticism. The foregoing genera- The vanished gods to me appear;
tions beheld God and nature face to face; And one to me are shame and fame.
we, through their eyes. Why should not we

28

They reckon ill who leave me out; Emerson, he worked his way

When me they fly, I am the wings; through Harvard. Throughout his

I am the doubter and the doubt, life, he reduced his needs to the

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings simplest level and managed to live

on very little money, thus maintain-

The strong gods pine for my ing his independence. In essence,

abode, he made living his career. A noncon-

And pine in vain the sacred Seven, formist, he attempted to live his life

But thou, meek lover of the good! at all times according to his rigor-

Find me, and turn thy back on ous principles. This attempt was

heaven. the subject of many of his writings.

Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden,

This poem, published in the first or, Life in the Woods (1854), is the

number of the Atlantic Monthly result of two years, two months, and

magazine (1857), confused readers two days (from 1845 to 1847) he

unfamiliar with Brahma, the high- spent living in a cabin he built at

est Hindu god, the eternal and infi- Walden Pond on property owned by

nite soul of the universe. Emerson Emerson. In Walden, Thoreau con-

had this advice for his readers: sciously shapes this time into one

“Tell them to say Jehovah instead year, and the book is carefully con-

of Brahma.” structed so the seasons are subtly

The British critic Matthew Arnold evoked in order. The book also

said the most important writings in is organized so that the simplest

English in the 19th century had earthly concerns come first (in the

been Wordsworth’s poems and section called “Economy,” he des-

Emerson’s essays. A great prose- cribes the expenses of building a

poet, Emerson influenced a long cabin); by the ending, the book

line of American poets, including has progressed to meditations on

Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, the stars.

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace In Walden, Thoreau, a lover of

Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert travel books and the author of sev-
Frost. He is also credited with HENRY DAVID THOREAU eral, gives us an anti-travel book

influencing the philosophies of that paradoxically opens the inner

John Dewey, George Santayana, frontier of self-discovery as no

Friedrich Nietzsche, and William American book had up to this time.

James. As deceptively modest as Thoreau’s

ascetic life, it is no less than a guide

Henry David Thoreau to living the classical ideal of the

(1817-1862) good life. Both poetry and philoso-

Henry David Thoreau, of French phy, this long poetic essay chal-

and Scottish descent, was born in lenges the reader to examine his or

Concord and made it his perma- Photo © The Bettmann her life and live it authentically. The
nent home. From a poor family, like Archive building of the cabin, described in

29

great detail, is a concrete metaphor WALT WHITMAN wood, her wildman a Robin
for the careful building of a soul. In Hood. There is plenty of genial
his journal for January 30, 1852, Photo courtesy Library of love of nature in her poets, but
Thoreau explains his preference Congress not so much of nature herself.
for living rooted in one place: “I am Her chronicles inform us when
afraid to travel much or to famous her wild animals, but not
places, lest it might completely dis- the wildman in her, became
sipate the mind.” extinct. There was need of
America.
Thoreau’s method of retreat and
concentration resembles Asian Walden inspired William Butler
meditation techniques. The resem- Yeats, a passionate Irish national-
blance is not accidental: like ist, to write “The Lake Isle of
Emerson and Whitman, he was Innisfree,” while Thoreau’s essay
influenced by Hindu and Buddhist “Civil Disobedience,” with its theo-
philosophy. His most treasured ry of passive resistance based on
possession was his library of Asian the moral necessity for the just
classics, which he shared with individual to disobey unjust laws,
Emerson. His eclectic style draws was an inspiration for Mahat-
on Greek and Latin classics and ma Gandhi’s Indian independence
is crystalline, punning, and as rich- movement and Martin Luther King’s
ly metaphorical as the English struggle for black Americans’ civil
metaphysical writers of the late rights in the 20th century.
Renaissance.
Thoreau is the most attractive
In Walden, Thoreau not only tests of the Transcendentalists today
the theories of Transcendental- because of his ecological con-
ism, he re-enacts the collective sciousness, do-it-yourself indepen-
American experience of the 19th dence, ethical commitment to abo-
century: living on the frontier. litionism, and political theory of
Thoreau felt that his contribution civil disobedience and peaceful
would be to renew a sense of the resistance. His ideas are still fresh,
wilderness in language. His journal and his incisive poetic style and
has an undated entry from 1851: habit of close observation are still
modern.
English literature from the
days of the minstrels to the Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Lake Poets, Chaucer and
Spenser and Shakespeare and Born on Long Island, New York,
Milton included, breathes no Walt Whitman was a part-time car-
quite fresh and in this sense, penter and man of the people,
wild strain. It is an essentially whose brilliant, innovative work
tame and civilized literature, expressed the country’s democrat-
reflecting Greece and Rome. ic spirit. Whitman was largely self-
Her wilderness is a green- taught; he left school at the age of

30

11 to go to work, missing the sort of traditional “The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt

education that made most American authors with dry wood, her children gazing on....I am the

respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the

of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised dogs....I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone

throughout his life, contains “Song of Myself,” broken....”

the most stunningly original poem ever written More than any other writer, Whitman invented

by an American. The enthusiastic praise that the myth of democratic America. “The Americans

Emerson and a few others heaped on this of all nations at any time upon the earth have

daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic probably the fullest poetical nature. The United

vocation, although the book was not a popular States is essentially the greatest poem.” When

success. Whitman wrote this, he daringly turned upside

A visionary book celebrating all creation, down the general opinion that America was too

Leaves of Grass was inspired largely by brash and new to be poetic. He invented a time-

Emerson’s writings, especially his essay “The less America of the free imagination, peopled

Poet,” which predicted a robust, open-hearted, with pioneering spirits of all nations. D.H.

universal kind of poet uncannily like Whitman Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accu-

himself. The poem’s innovative, unrhymed, free- rately called him the poet of the “open road.”

verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant hitman’s greatness is visible in many of
democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic his poems, among them “Crossing
Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle
Wassertion that the poet’s self was one with the
poem, the universe, and the reader permanently Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the

altered the course of American poetry. Dooryard Bloom’d,” a moving elegy on the death

Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natur- of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is

al as the American continent; it was the epic gen- his long essay “Democratic Vistas” (1871), writ-

erations of American critics had been calling for, ten during the unrestrained materialism of

although they did not recognize it. Movement rip- industrialism’s “Gilded Age.” In this essay,

ples through “Song of Myself” like restless Whitman justly criticizes America for its “mighty,

music: many-threaded wealth and industry” that mask

an underlying “dry and flat Sahara” of soul. He

My ties and ballasts leave me... calls for a new kind of literature to revive the

I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents American population (“Not the book needs so

I am afoot with my vision. much to be the complete thing, but the reader of

the book does”). Yet ultimately, Whitman’s main

The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights claim to immortality lies in “Song of Myself.”

and sounds. Whitman’s birds are not the conven- Here he places the Romantic self at the center of

tional “winged spirits” of poetry. His “yellow- the consciousness of the poem:

crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh

at night and feeds upon small crabs.” Whitman I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

seems to project himself into everything that he And what I assume you shall assume,

sees or imagines. He is mass man, “Voyaging to For every atom belonging to me

every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying as good belongs to you.

with the modern crowd as eager and fickle as

any.” But he is equally the suffering individual,

31

Whitman’s voice electrifies even North American Review and the

modern readers with his proclama- Atlantic Monthly.

tion of the unity and vital force of The writings of the Brahmin poets

all creation. He was enormously fused American and European tra-

innovative. From him spring the ditions and sought to create a con-

poem as autobiography, the tinuity of shared Atlantic experi-

American Everyman as bard, the ence. These scholar-poets attempt-

reader as creator, and the still-con- ed to educate and elevate the gen-

temporary discovery of “experi- eral populace by introducing a

mental,” or organic, form. European dimension to American

literature. Ironically, their overall

THE BRAHMIN POETS effect was conservative. By insisting
on European things and forms, they
In their time, the Boston retarded the growth of a distinctive
Brahmins (as the patrician, American consciousness. Well-
Harvard-educated class came meaning men, their conservative
to be called) supplied the most backgrounds blinded them to the
respected and genuinely cultivated daring innovativeness of Thoreau,
literary arbiters of the United Whitman (whom they refused to
States. Their lives fitted a pleasant meet socially), and Edgar Allan Poe
pattern of wealth and leisure
directed by the strong New

England work ethic and respect for (whom even Emerson regarded as

learning. the “jingle man”). They were pillars

In an earlier Puritan age, the of what was called the “genteel tra-

Boston Brahmins would have been dition” that three generations of

ministers; in the 19th century, they American realists had to battle.

became professors, often at Har- Partly because of their benign but

vard. Late in life they sometimes bland influence, it was almost 100

became ambassadors or received years before the distinctive Amer-

honorary degrees from European ican genius of Whitman, Melville,

institutions. Most of them travelled Thoreau, and Poe was generally rec-

or were educated in Europe: They HENRY WADSWORTH ognized in the United States.
were familiar with the ideas and LONGFELLOW
books of Britain, Germany, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

France, and often Italy and Spain. (1807-1882)

Upper class in background but The most important Boston

democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets were Henry

Brahmin poets carried their gen- Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wen-

teel, European-oriented views to dell Holmes, and James Russell

every section of the United States, Lowell. Longfellow, professor of

through public lectures at the 3,000 modern languages at Harvard, was

lyceums (centers for public lec- the best-known American poet of

tures) and in the pages of two his day. He was responsible for the

influential Boston magazines, the Photo courtesy Brown Brothers misty, ahistorical, legendary sense

32

of the past that merged American and European Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)

traditions. He wrote three long narrative poems Oliver Wendell Holmes, a celebrated physician

popularizing native legends in European meters and professor of anatomy and physiology at

— “Evangeline” (1847), “The Song of Hiawatha” Harvard, is the hardest of the three well-known

(1855), and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” Brahmins to categorize because his work is

(1858). marked by a refreshing versatility. It encompass-

Longfellow also wrote textbooks on modern es collections of humorous essays (for example,

languages and a travel book entitled Outre-Mer, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858), nov-

retelling foreign legends and patterned after els (Elsie Venner, 1861), biographies (Ralph

Washington Irving’s Sketch Book. Although con- Waldo Emerson, 1885), and verse that could be

ventionality, sentimentality, and facile handling sprightly (“The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or, The

mar the long poems, haunting short lyrics like Wonderful One-Hoss Shay”), philosophical

“The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” (1854), “My (“The Chambered Nautilus”), or fervently patri-

Lost Youth” (1855), and “The Tide Rises, The otic (“Old Ironsides”).

Tide Falls” (1880) continue to give pleasure. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the suburb

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) of Boston that is home to Harvard, Holmes was
the son of a prominent local minister. His moth-

James Russell Lowell, who became professor er was a descendant of the poet Anne Brad-

of modern languages at Harvard after Longfellow street. In his time, and more so thereafter, he

retired, is the Matthew Arnold of American liter- symbolized wit, intelligence, and charm not as a

ature. He began as a poet but gradually lost his discoverer or a trailblazer, but rather as an

poetic ability, ending as a respected critic and exemplary interpreter of everything from society

educator. As editor of the Atlantic and co-editor and language to medicine and human nature.

of the North American Review, Lowell exercised

enormous influence. Lowell’s A Fable for Critics TWO REFORMERS

(1848) is a funny and apt appraisal of American ew England sparkled with intellectual ener-
writers, as in his comment: “There comes Poe, gy in the years before the Civil War. Some
of the stars that shine more brightly today
Nwith his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three-fifths
of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” than the famous constellation of Brahmins were

Under his wife’s influence, Lowell became a dimmed by poverty or accidents of gender or

liberal reformer, abolitionist, and supporter of race in their own time. Modern readers increas-

women’s suffrage and laws ending child labor. ingly value the work of abolitionist John

His Biglow Papers, First Series (1847-48), creates Greenleaf Whittier and feminist and social

Hosea Biglow, a shrewd but uneducated village reformer Margaret Fuller.

poet who argues for reform in dialect poetry.

Benjamin Franklin and Phillip Freneau had used John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

intelligent villagers as mouthpieces for social John Greenleaf Whittier, the most active poet

commentary. Lowell writes in the same vein, link- of the era, had a background very similar to Walt

ing the colonial “character” tradition with the Whitman’s. He was born and raised on a modest

new realism and regionalism based on dialect Quaker farm in Massachusetts, had little formal

that flowered in the 1850s and came to fruition in education, and worked as a journalist. For

Mark Twain. decades before it became popular, he was an

ardent abolitionist. Whittier is respected for

33

anti-slavery poems such as EMILY DICKINSON were published in her book Papers
“Ichabod,” and his poetry is some- on Literature and Art (1846). A year
times viewed as an early example of Daguerreotype courtesy earlier, she had her most sig-
regional realism. Harper & Bros. nificant book, Woman in the
Nineteenth Century. It originally
Whittier’s sharp images, simple had appeared in the Tran-
constructions, and ballad-like tet- scendentalist magazine, The Dial,
rameter couplets have the simple which she edited from 1840 to
earthy texture of Robert Burns. His 1842.
best work, the long poem “Snow
Bound,” vividly recreates the poet’s Fuller’s Woman in the Nine-
deceased family members and teenth Century is the earliest and
friends as he remembers them most American exploration of
from childhood, huddled cozily women’s role in society. Often
around the blazing hearth during applying democratic and Transcen-
one of New England’s blustering dental principles, Fuller thought-
snowstorms. This simple, religious, fully analyzes the numerous subtle
intensely personal poem, coming causes and evil consequences of
after the long nightmare of the Civil sexual discrimination and suggests
War, is an elegy for the dead and a positive steps to be taken. Many of
healing hymn. It affirms the eternity her ideas are strikingly modern.
of the spirit, the timeless power of She stresses the importance of
love in the memory, and the undi- “self-dependence,” which women
minished beauty of nature, despite lack because “they are taught to
violent outer political storms. learn their rule from without, not
to unfold it from within.”
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
Fuller is finally not a feminist so
Margaret Fuller, an outstanding much as an activist and reformer
essayist, was born and raised in Cam- dedicated to the cause of creative
bridge, Massachusetts. From a human freedom and dignity for all:
modest financial background, she
was educated at home by her father ...Let us be wise and not
(women were not allowed to attend impede the soul....Let us have
Harvard) and became a child prodi- one creative energy....Let it
gy in the classics and modern litera- take what form it will, and let
tures. Her special passion was us not bind it by the past to
German Romantic literature, espe- man or woman, black or white.
cially Goethe, whom she translated.
EMILY DICKINSON
The first professional woman (1830-1886)
journalist of note in America, Fuller
wrote influential book reviews and Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a
reports on social issues such as the link between her era and the liter-
treatment of women prisoners and ary sensitivities of the turn of the
the insane. Some of these essays century. A radical individualist, she

34

was born and spent her life in Amherst, Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition of 1955.
Massachusetts, a small Calvinist village. She They bristle with odd capitalizations and dashes.
never married, and she led an unconventional
life that was outwardly uneventful but was A nonconformist, like Thoreau she often re-
full of inner intensity. She loved nature and versed meanings of words and phrases and used
found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, paradox to great effect. From 435:
plants, and changing seasons of the New England
countryside. Much Madness is divinest sense —
To a discerning Eye —
Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as Much Sense — the starkest Madness —
a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive ‘Tis the Majority
psyche and possibly to make time for writ- In this, as All, prevail —
ing (for stretches of time she wrote about one Assent — and you are sane —
poem a day). Her day also included homemaking Demur — you’re straightway dangerous
for her attorney father, a prominent figure in And handled with a chain —
Amherst who became a member of Congress.
Her wit shines in the following poem (288),
Dickinson was not widely read, but knew the which ridicules ambition and public life:
Bible, the works of William Shakespeare, and
works of classical mythology in great depth. I’m Nobody! Who are you?
These were her true teachers, for Dickinson was Are you — Nobody — Too?
certainly the most solitary literary figure of her Then there’s a pair of us?
time. That this shy, withdrawn village woman, Don’t tell! they’d advertise — you
almost unpublished and unknown, created some know!
of the greatest American poetry of the 19th cen- How dreary — to be — Somebody!
tury has fascinated the public since the 1950s, How public — like a Frog —
when her poetry was rediscovered. To tell one’s name — the livelong
June —
Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style To an admiring Bog!
is even more modern and innovative than
Whitman’s. She never uses two words when one Dickinson’s 1,775 poems continue to intrigue
will do, and combines concrete things with
abstract ideas in an almost proverbial, com- critics, who often disagree about them. Some
pressed style. Her best poems have no fat; many
mock current sentimentality, and some are even stress her mystical side, some her sensitivity to
heretical. She sometimes shows a terrifying
existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores nature; many note her odd, exotic appeal. One
the dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing
death and the grave. Yet she also celebrated sim- modern critic, R.P. Blackmur, comments that
ple objects — a flower, a bee. Her poetry ex-
hibits great intelligence and often evokes the Dickinson’s poetry sometimes feels as if “a cat
agonizing paradox of the limits of the human con-
sciousness trapped in time. She had an excellent came at us speaking English.” Her clean, clear,
sense of humor, and her range of subjects and
treatment is amazingly wide. Her poems are gen- chiseled poems are some of the most fascinating
erally known by the numbers assigned them in
and challenging in American literature. ■

35

CHAPTER George Eliot, William Thackeray — lived in a
complex, well-articulated, traditional society and
4 shared with their readers attitudes that in-
formed their realistic fiction. American novelists
THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, were faced with a history of strife and revolution,
a geography of vast wilderness, and a fluid and
1820-1860: FICTION relatively classless democratic society. American
novels frequently reveal a revolutionary absence
Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, of tradition. Many English novels show a poor
Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily main character rising on the economic and social
Dickinson, and the Transcendentalists ladder, perhaps because of a good marriage or
represent the first great literary generation pro- the discovery of a hidden aristocratic past. But
duced in the United States. In the case of the this buried plot does not challenge the aristo-
novelists, the Romantic vision tended to express cratic social structure of England. On the con-
itself in the form Hawthorne called the “ro- trary, it confirms it. The rise of the main charac-
mance,” a heightened, emotional, and symbolic ter satisfies the wish fulfillment of the mainly
form of the novel. Romances were not love sto- middle-class readers.
ries, but serious novels that used special tech-
niques to communicate complex and subtle In contrast, the American novelist had to de-
meanings. pend on his or her own devices. America was, in
Instead of carefully defining realistic charac- part, an undefined, constantly moving frontier
ters through a wealth of detail, as most English populated by immigrants speaking foreign lan-
or continental novelists did, Hawthorne, Melville, guages and following strange and crude ways of
and Poe shaped heroic figures larger than life, life. Thus the main character in American litera-
burning with mythic significance. The typical pro- ture might find himself alone among cannibal
tagonists of the American Romance are haunted, tribes, as in Melville’s Typee, or exploring a
alienated individuals. Hawthorne’s Arthur wilderness like James Fenimore Cooper’s
Dimmesdale or Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Leatherstocking, or witnessing lonely visions
Letter, Melville’s Ahab in Moby-Dick, and the from the grave, like Poe’s solitary individuals, or
many isolated and obsessed characters of Poe’s meeting the devil walking in the forest, like
tales are lonely protagonists pitted against un- Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. Virtually all
knowable, dark fates that, in some mysterious the great American protagonists have been “lon-
way, grow out of their deepest unconscious ers.” The democratic American individual had, as
selves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actions it were, to invent himself.
of the anguished spirit.
One reason for this fictional exploration into The serious American novelist had to invent
the hidden recesses of the soul is the absence new forms as well — hence the sprawling, idio-
of settled, traditional community life in Amer- syncratic shape of Melville’s novel Moby-Dick,
ica. English novelists — Jane Austen, Charles and Poe’s dreamlike, wandering Narrative of
Dickens (the great favorite), Anthony Trollope, Arthur Gordon Pym. Few American novels achieve
formal perfection, even today. Instead of borrow-
ing tested literary methods, Americans tend to
invent new creative techniques. In America, it
is not enough to be a traditional and definable
social unit, for the old and traditional gets left

36

behind; the new, innovative force is NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE gious young man, the Reverend
the center of attention. Arthur Dimmesdale, and the sensu-
Photo courtesy OWI ous, beautiful townsperson, Hester
THE ROMANCE Prynne. Set in Boston around 1650
during early Puritan colonization,
The Romance form is dark and the novel highlights the Calvinistic
forbidding, indicating how obsession with morality, sexual
difficult it is to create an repression, guilt and confession,
identity without a stable society. and spiritual salvation.
Most of the Romantic heroes die in
the end: All the sailors except For its time, The Scarlet Letter
Ishmael are drowned in Moby- was a daring and even subversive
Dick, and the sensitive but sinful book. Hawthorne’s gentle style, re-
minister Arthur Dimmesdale dies mote historical setting, and ambi-
at the end of The Scarlet Letter. guity softened his grim themes and
The self-divided, tragic note in contented the general public, but
American literature becomes dom- sophisticated writers such as Ralph
inant in the novels, even before the Waldo Emerson and Herman Mel-
Civil War of the 1860s manifested ville recognized the book’s “hell-
the greater social tragedy of a soci- ish” power. It treated issues that
ety at war with itself. were usually suppressed in 19th-
century America, such as the im-
Nathaniel Hawthorne pact of the new, liberating demo-
(1804-1864) cratic experience on individual be-
havior, especially on sexual and re-
Nathaniel Hawthorne, a fifth- ligious freedom.
generation American of English
descent, was born in Salem, Massa- The book is superbly organized
chusetts, a wealthy seaport north and beautifully written. Appropri-
of Boston that specialized in East ately, it uses allegory, a technique
India trade. One of his ancestors the early Puritan colonists them-
had been a judge in an earlier cen- selves practiced.
tury, during trials in Salem of
women accused of being witches. Hawthorne’s reputation rests on
Hawthorne used the idea of a curse his other novels and tales as well.
on the family of an evil judge in his In The House of the Seven Gables
novel The House of the Seven (1851), he again returns to New
Gables. England’s history. The crumbling of
the “house” refers to a family in
Many of Hawthorne’s stories are Salem as well as to the actual struc-
set in Puritan New England, and his ture. The theme concerns an in-
greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter herited curse and its resolution
(1850), has become the classic through love. As one critic has
portrayal of Puritan America. It noted, the idealistic protagonist
tells of the passionate, forbidden Holgrave voices Hawthorne’s own
love affair linking a sensitive, reli- democratic distrust of old aristo-

37

cratic families: “The truth is, that once in every likely wilderness places, Hawthorne’s stories
half-century, at least, a family should be merged and novels repeatedly show broken, cursed, or
into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and artificial families and the sufferings of the isolat-
forget about its ancestors.” ed individual.

Hawthorne’s last two novels were less suc- The ideology of revolution, too, may have
cessful. Both use modern settings, which played a part in glorifying a sense of proud yet
hamper the magic of romance. The alienated freedom. The American Revolution,
Blithedale Romance (1852) is interesting for its from a psychohistorical viewpoint, parallels an
portrait of the socialist, utopian Brook Farm adolescent rebellion away from the parent-figure
community. In the book, Hawthorne criticizes of England and the larger family of the British
egotistical, power-hungry social reformers Empire. Americans won their independence and
whose deepest instincts are not genuinely demo- were then faced with the bewildering dilemma of
cratic. The Marble Faun (1860), though set in discovering their identity apart from old authori-
Rome, dwells on the Puritan themes of sin, isola- ties. This scenario was played out countless
tion, expiation, and salvation. times on the frontier, to the extent that, in fic-
These themes, and his characteristic settings tion, isolation often seems the basic American
in Puritan colonial New England, are trademarks condition of life. Puritanism and its Protestant
of many of Hawthorne’s best-known shorter offshoots may have further weakened the family
stories: “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Young by preaching that the individual’s first responsi-
Goodman Brown,” and “My Kinsman, Major bility was to save his or her own soul.
Molineux.” In the last of these, a naïve young man
from the country comes to the city — a common Herman Melville (1819-1891)
route in urbanizing 19th-century America — to
seek help from his powerful relative, whom he Herman Melville, like Nathaniel Hawthorne,
has never met. Robin has great difficulty finding was a descendant of an old, wealthy family that
the major, and finally joins in a strange night riot fell abruptly into poverty upon the death of the
in which a man who seems to be a disgraced father. Despite his patrician upbringing, proud
criminal is comically and cruelly driven out of family traditions, and hard work, Melville found
town. Robin laughs loudest of all until he realizes himself in poverty with no college education. At
that this “criminal” is none other than the man 19 he went to sea. His interest in sailors’ lives
he sought — a representative of the British who grew naturally out of his own experiences, and
has just been overthrown by a revolutionary most of his early novels grew out of his voyages.
American mob. The story confirms the bond of In these we see the young Melville’s wide, demo-
sin and suffering shared by all humanity. It also cratic experience and hatred of tyranny and in-
stresses the theme of the self-made man: Robin justice. His first book, Typee, was based on his
must learn, like every democratic American, to time spent among the supposedly cannibalistic
prosper from his own hard work, not from spe- but hospitable tribe of the Taipis in the
cial favors from wealthy relatives. Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. The book
“My Kinsman, Major Molineux” casts light on praises the islanders and their natural, harmo-
one of the most striking elements in Haw- nious life, and criticizes the Christian missionar-
thorne’s fiction: the lack of functioning families ies, who Melville found less genuinely civilized
in his works. Although Cooper’s Leather-Stocking than the people they came to convert.
Tales manage to introduce families into the least
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville’s master-
piece, is the epic story of the whaling ship

38

Pequod and its “ungodly, god-like HERMAN MELVILLE — but whether this vision is evil or
man,” Captain Ahab, whose obses- good, human or inhuman, is never
sive quest for the white whale Portrait courtesy Harvard explained.
Moby-Dick leads the ship and its College Library
men to destruction. This work, a The novel is modern in its ten-
realistic adventure novel, contains a dency to be self-referential, or re-
series of meditations on the human flexive. In other words, the novel
condition. Whaling, throughout the often is about itself. Melville fre-
book, is a grand metaphor for the quently comments on mental pro-
pursuit of knowledge. Realistic cat- cesses such as writing, reading,
alogues and descriptions of whales and understanding. One chapter,
and the whaling industry punctuate for instance, is an exhaustive sur-
the book, but these carry symbolic vey in which the narrator attempts
connotations. In chapter 15, “The a classification but finally gives up,
Right Whale’s Head,” the narrator saying that nothing great can ever
says that the Right Whale is a Stoic be finished (“God keep me from
and the Sperm Whale is a Platonian, ever completing anything. This
referring to two classical schools of whole book is but a draught — nay,
philosophy. but the draught of a draught.
O Time, Strength, Cash and Pa-
Although Melville’s novel is philo- tience”). Melville’s notion of the
sophical, it is also tragic. Despite literary text as an imperfect ver-
his heroism, Ahab is doomed and sion or an abandoned draft is quite
perhaps damned in the end. Nature, contemporary.
however beautiful, remains alien
and potentially deadly. In Moby- Ahab insists on imaging a hero-
Dick, Melville challenges Emerson’s ic, timeless world of absolutes in
optimistic idea that humans can which he can stand above his men.
understand nature. Moby-Dick, the Unwisely, he demands a finished
great white whale, is an inscrutable, text, an answer. But the novel
cosmic existence that dominates shows that just as there are no fin-
the novel, just as he obsesses Ahab. ished texts, there are no final
Facts about the whale and whaling answers except, perhaps, death.
cannot explain Moby-Dick; on the
contrary, the facts themselves tend Certain literary references res-
to become symbols, and every fact onate throughout the novel. Ahab,
is obscurely related in a cosmic named for an Old Testament king,
web to every other fact. This idea of desires a total, Faustian, god-like
correspondence (as Melville calls it knowledge. Like Oedipus in Soph-
in the “Sphinx” chapter) does not, ocles’ play, who pays tragically for
however, mean that humans can wrongful knowledge, Ahab is struck
“read” truth in nature, as it does blind before he is wounded in the
in Emerson. Behind Melville’s accu- leg and finally killed. Moby-Dick
mulation of facts is a mystic vision ends with the word “orphan.”
Ishmael, the narrator, is an orphan-
like wanderer. The name Ishmael

39

emanates from the Book of Genesis in the Old sinks, Ishmael is saved by the engraved coffin
Testament — he was the son of Abraham and made by his close friend, the heroic tatooed
Hagar (servant to Abraham’s wife, Sarah). Ish- harpooner and Polynesian prince Queequeg. The
mael and Hagar were cast into the wilderness by coffin’s primitive, mythological designs incorpo-
Abraham. rate the history of the cosmos. Ishmael is res-
cued from death by an object of death. From
Other examples exist. Rachel (one of the death life emerges, in the end.
patriarch Jacob’s wives) is the name of the boat
that rescues Ishmael at book’s end. Finally, Moby-Dick has been called a “natural epic” —
the metaphysical whale reminds Jewish and a magnificent dramatization of the human spirit
Christian readers of the Biblical story of Jonah, set in primitive nature — because of its hunter
who was tossed overboard by fellow sailors who myth, its initiation theme, its Edenic island sym-
considered him an object of ill fortune. bolism, its positive treatment of pre-technologi-
Swallowed by a “big fish,” according to the bibli- cal peoples, and its quest for rebirth. In setting
cal text, he lived for a time in its belly before humanity alone in nature, it is eminently
being returned to dry land through God’s inter- American. The French writer and politician Alexis
vention. Seeking to flee from punishment, he de Tocqueville had predicted, in the 1835 work
only brought more suffering upon himself. Democracy in America, that this theme would
arise in America as a result of its democracy:
Historical references also enrich the novel.
The ship Pequod is named for an extinct New The destinies of mankind, man himself
England Indian tribe; thus the name suggests taken aloof from his country and his age and
that the boat is doomed to destruction. Whaling standing in the presence of Nature and God,
was in fact a major industry, especially in New with his passions, his doubts, his rare
England: It supplied oil as an energy source, propensities and inconceivable wretched-
especially for lamps. Thus the whale does literal- ness, will become the chief, if not the sole,
ly “shed light” on the universe. Whaling was also theme of (American) poetry.
inherently expansionist and linked with the idea
of manifest destiny, since it required Americans Tocqueville reasons that, in a democracy, liter-
to sail round the world in search of whales (in ature would dwell on “the hidden depths of the
fact, the present state of Hawaii came under immaterial nature of man” rather than on mere
American domination because it was used as appearances or superficial distinctions such as
the major refueling base for American whaling class and status. Certainly both Moby-Dick and
ships). The Pequod’s crew members represent Typee, like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and
all races and various religions, suggesting the Walden, fit this description. They are celebra-
idea of America as a universal state of mind as tions of nature and pastoral subversions of class-
well as a melting pot. Finally, Ahab embodies the oriented, urban civilization.
tragic version of democratic American individual-
ism. He asserts his dignity as an individual and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
dares to oppose the inexorable external forces
of the universe. Edgar Allan Poe, a southerner, shares with
Melville a darkly metaphysical vision mixed with
The novel’s epilogue tempers the tragic elements of realism, parody, and burlesque. He
destruction of the ship. Throughout, Melville refined the short story genre and invented
stresses the importance of friendship and the detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure
multicultural human community. After the ship

40

the genres of science fiction, hor- the overcivilized yet deathly interi-

ror, and fantasy so popular today. or of his characters’ disturbed psy-

Poe’s short and tragic life was ches. They are symbolic expres-

plagued with insecurity. Like so sions of the unconscious, and thus

many other major 19th-century are central to his art.

American writers, Poe was or- Poe’s verse, like that of many

phaned at an early age. Poe’s southerners, was very musical and

strange marriage in 1835 to his first strictly metrical. His best-known

cousin Virginia Clemm, who was not poem, in his own lifetime and

yet 14, has been interpreted as an today, is “The Raven” (1845). In

attempt to find the stable family life this eerie poem, the haunted,

he lacked. sleepless narrator, who has been

Poe believed that strangeness reading and mourning the death of
was an essential ingredient his “lost Lenore” at midnight, is
of beauty, and his writing is visited by a raven (a bird that eats

often exotic. His stories and poems dead flesh, hence a symbol of

are populated with doomed, intro- death) who perches above his

spective aristocrats (Poe, like many door and ominously repeats the

other southerners, cherished an poem’s famous refrain, “never-

aristocratic ideal). These gloomy more.” The poem ends in a frozen

characters never seem to work or scene of death-in-life:

socialize; instead they bury them-

selves in dark, moldering castles And the Raven, never flitting,

symbolically decorated with bizarre still

rugs and draperies that hide the is sitting, still is sitting

real world of sun, windows, walls, On the pallid bust of Pallas just

and floors. The hidden rooms reveal above my chamber door;

ancient libraries, strange art works, And his eyes have all the

and eclectic oriental objects. The seeming of

aristocrats play musical instru- a demon’s that is dreaming,

ments or read ancient books while And the lamp-light o’er him
they brood on tragedies, often the EDGAR ALLAN POE streaming throws his shadow

deaths of loved ones. Themes on the floor;

of death-in-life, especially being And my soul from out

buried alive or returning like a vam- that shadow

pire from the grave, appear in many that lies floating on the floor

of his works, including “The Shall be lifted — nevermore!

Premature Burial,” “Ligeia,” “The

Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Fall Poe’s stories — such as those

of the House of Usher.” Poe’s twi- cited above — have been de-

light realm between life and death scribed as tales of horror. Stories

and his gaudy, Gothic settings are like “The Gold Bug” and “The

not merely decorative. They reflect Photo © The Bettmann Archive Purloined Letter” are more tales

41

of ratiocination, or reasoning. The horror tales materialism and excessive competition — lone-
prefigure works by such American authors of liness, alienation, and images of death-in-life.
horror fantasy as H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen
King, while the tales of ratiocination are harbin- Poe’s “decadence” also reflects the devalua-
gers of the detective fiction of Dashiell tion of symbols that occurred in the 19th century
Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, — the tendency to mix art objects promiscuous-
and John D. MacDonald. There is a hint, too, of ly from many eras and places, in the process
what was to follow as science fiction. All of these stripping them of their identity and reducing
stories reveal Poe’s fascination with the mind them to merely decorative items in a collection.
and the unsettling scientific knowledge that was The resulting chaos of styles was particularly
radically secularizing the 19th-century world noticeable in the United States, which often
view. lacked traditional styles of its own. The jumble
reflects the loss of coherent systems of thought
In every genre, Poe explores the psyche. as immigration, urbanization, and industrializa-
Profound psychological insights glint throughout tion uprooted families and traditional ways. In
the stories. “Who has not, a hundred times, art, this confusion of symbols fueled the
found himself committing a vile or silly action, grotesque, an idea that Poe explicitly made his
for no other reason than because he knows he theme in his classic collection of stories Tales of
should not,” we read in “The Black Cat.” To the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).
explore the exotic and strange aspect of psycho-
logical processes, Poe delved into accounts of WOMEN WRITERS AND
madness and extreme emotion. The painfully REFORMERS
deliberate style and elaborate explanation in the
stories heighten the sense of the horrible by American women endured many inequalities
making the events seem vivid and plausible. in the 19th century: They were denied the
vote, barred from professional schools
Poe’s combination of decadence and romantic and most higher education, forbidden to speak in
primitivism appealed enormously to Europeans, public and even attend public conventions, and
particularly to the French poets Stéphane unable to own property. Despite these obstacles,
Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, and a strong women’s network sprang up. Through
Arthur Rimbaud. But Poe is not un-American, letters, personal friendships, formal meetings,
despite his aristocratic disgust with democracy, women’s newspapers, and books, women fur-
preference for the exotic, and themes of dehu- thered social change. Intellectual women drew
manization. On the contrary, he is almost a text- parallels between themselves and slaves. They
book example of Tocqueville’s prediction that courageously demanded fundamental reforms,
American democracy would produce works that such as the abolition of slavery and women’s suf-
lay bare the deepest, hidden parts of the psyche. frage, despite social ostracism and sometimes
Deep anxiety and psychic insecurity seem to have financial ruin. Their works were the vanguard of
occurred earlier in America than in Europe, for intellectual expression of a larger women’s liter-
Europeans at least had a firm, complex social ary tradition that included the sentimental novel.
structure that gave them psychological security. Women’s sentimental novels, such as Harriet
In America, there was no compensating security; Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were enor-
it was every man for himself. Poe accurately mously popular. They appealed to the emotions
described the underside of the American dream and often dramatized contentious social issues,
of the self-made man and showed the price of particularly those touching the family and

42

women’s roles and responsibilities. struggle for women’s rights. She gave public lec-
Abolitionist Lydia Child (1802-1880), who great- tures in several states, partly to support the edu-
cation of her seven children.
ly influenced Margaret Fuller, was a leader of this
network. Her successful 1824 novel Hobomok After her husband died, Cady Stanton deep-
shows the need for racial and religious tolera- ened her analysis of inequality between the
tion. Its setting — Puritan Salem, Massachu- sexes. Her book The Woman’s Bible (1895) dis-
setts — anticipated Nathaniel Hawthorne. An cerns a deep-seated anti-female bias in Judaeo-
activist, Child founded a private girls’ school, Christian tradition. She lectured on such sub-
founded and edited the first journal for children jects as divorce, women’s rights, and religion
in the United States, and published the first anti- until her death at 86, just after writing a letter to
slavery tract, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of President Theodore Roosevelt supporting the
Americans Called Africans, in 1833. This daring women’s vote. Her numerous works — at first
work made her notorious and ruined her finan- pseudonymous, but later under her own name —
cially. Her History of the Condition of Women in include three co-authored volumes of History of
Various Ages and Nations (1855) argues for Woman Suffrage (1881-1886) and a candid,
women’s equality by pointing to their historical humorous autobiography.
achievements.
Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883) epitomized the
Angelina Grimké (1805-1879) and Sarah Grimké endurance and charisma of this extraordi-
(1792-1873) were born into a large family of nary group of women. Born a slave in New
wealthy slaveowners in elegant Charleston, South York, she grew up speaking Dutch. She escaped
Carolina. These sisters moved to the North to from slavery in 1827, settling with a son and
defend the rights of blacks and women. As speak- daughter in the supportive Dutch-American Van
ers for the New York Anti-Slavery Society, they Wagener family, for whom she worked as a ser-
were the first women to publicly lecture to audi- vant. They helped her win a legal battle for her
ences, including men. In letters, essays, and son’s freedom, and she took their name. Striking
studies, they drew parallels between racism and out on her own, she worked with a preacher to
sexism. convert prostitutes to Christianity and lived in
a progressive communal home. She was chris-
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), abolition- tened “Sojourner Truth” for the mystical voices
ist and women’s rights activist, lived for a time in and visions she began to experience. To spread
Boston, where she befriended Lydia Child. With the truth of these visionary teachings, she
Lucretia Mott, she organized the 1848 Seneca sojourned alone, lecturing, singing gospel songs,
Falls Convention for Women’s rights; she also and preaching abolitionism through many states
drafted its Declaration of Sentiments. Her over three decades. Encouraged by Elizabeth
“Woman’s Declaration of Independence” begins Cady Stanton, she advocated women’s suffrage.
“men and women are created equal” and Her life is told in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth
includes a resolution to give women the right (1850), an autobiographical account transcribed
to vote. With Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady and edited by Olive Gilbert. Illiterate her whole
Stanton campaigned for suffrage in the 1860s and life, she spoke Dutch-accented English. So-
1870s, formed the anti-slavery Women’s Loyal journer Truth is said to have bared her breast at
National League and the National Woman a women’s rights convention when she was
Suffrage Association, and co-edited the weekly accused of really being a man. Her answer to a
newspaper Revolution. President of the Woman man who said that women were the weaker sex
Suffrage Association for 21 years, she led the

43

has become legendary: HARRIET Civil War (1861-1865).
BEECHER STOWE Reasons for the success of Uncle
I have ploughed and planted, and
gathered into bars, and no man Photo courtesy Tom’s Cabin are obvious. It reflect-
could head me! And ain’t I a Culver Pictures, Inc. ed the idea that slavery in the
woman? I could work as much United States, the nation that pur-
and eat as much as a man — 44 portedly embodied democracy and
when I could get it —and bear equality for all, was an injustice of
the lash as well! And ain’t I a colossal proportions.
woman? I have borne thirteen
children, and seen them most all Stowe herself was a perfect
sold off to slavery, and when I representative of old New
cried out with my mother’s grief, England Puritan stock. Her
none but Jesus heard me! And father, brother, and husband all
ain’t I a woman? were well-known, learned Prot-
estant clergymen and reformers.
This humorous and irreverent Stowe conceived the idea of the
orator has been compared to the novel — in a vision of an old,
great blues singers. Harriet Beech- ragged slave being beaten — as
er Stowe and many others found she participated in a church ser-
wisdom in this visionary black vice. Later, she said that the novel
woman, who could declare, “Lord, was inspired and “written by God.”
Lord, I can love even de white folk!” Her motive was the religious pas-
sion to reform life by making it
Harriet Beecher Stowe more godly. The romantic period
(1811-1896) had ushered in an era of feeling:
The virtues of family and love
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel reigned supreme. Stowe’s novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among attacked slavery precisely because
the Lowly was the most popular it violated domestic values.
American book of the 19th centu-
ry. First published serially in the Uncle Tom, the slave and central
National Era magazine (1851-1852), character, is a true Christian mar-
it was an immediate success. Forty tyr who labors to convert his kind
different publishers printed it in master, St. Clare, prays for St.
England alone, and it was quickly Clare’s soul as he dies, and is
translated into 20 languages, receiv- killed defending slave women.
ing the praise of such authors as Slavery is depicted as evil not for
Georges Sand in France, Heinrich political or philosophical reasons
Heine in Germany, and Ivan Tur- but mainly because it divides fami-
genev in Russia. Its passionate ap- lies, destroys normal parental love,
peal for an end to slavery in the and is inherently un-Christian. The
United States inflamed the debate most touching scenes show an
that, within a decade, led to the U.S. agonized slave mother unable to
help her screaming child and a
father sold away from his family.

These were crimes against the FREDERICK DOUGLASS by glimpses of her beloved children
sanctity of domestic love. seen through holes that she drilled
Photo-ambrotype courtesy through the ceiling. She finally
Stowe’s novel was not originally National Portrait Gallery, escaped to the North, settling in
intended as an attack on the South; Smithsonian Institution Rochester, New York, where
in fact, Stowe had visited the Frederick Douglass was publishing
South, liked southerners, and por- the anti-slavery newspaper North
trayed them kindly. Southern slave- Star and near which (in Seneca
owners are good masters and treat Falls) a women’s rights convention
Tom well. St. Clare personally ab- had recently met. There Jacobs
hors slavery and intends to free all became friends with Amy Post, a
of his slaves. The evil master Quaker feminist abolitionist, who
Simon Legree, on the other hand, encouraged her to write her autobi-
is a northerner and the villain. ography. Incidents in the Life of a
Ironically, the novel was meant to Slave Girl, published under the
reconcile the North and South, pseudonym “Linda Brent” in 1861,
which were drifting toward the was edited by Lydia Child. It out-
Civil War a decade away. Ultimately, spokenly condemned the sexual
though, the book was used by abo- exploitation of black slave women.
litionists and others as a polemic Jacobs’s book, like Douglass’s, is
against the South. part of the slave narrative genre
extending back to Olaudah Equiano
Harriet Jacobs (1818-1896) in colonial times.

Born a slave in North Carolina, Harriet Wilson (1807-1870)
Harriet Jacobs was taught to read
and write by her mistress. On her Harriet Wilson was the first
mistress’s death, Jacobs was sold African-American to publish a novel
to a white master who tried to in the United States — Our Nig: or,
force her to have sexual relations. Sketches from the life of a Free
She resisted him, finding another Black, in a two-storey white house,
white lover by whom she had two North. Showing that Slavery’s
children, who went to live with her Shadows Fall Even There (1859).
grandmother. “It seems less de- The novel realistically dramatizes
grading to give one’s self than to the marriage between a white wo-
submit to compulsion,” she can- man and a black man, and also de-
didly wrote. She escaped from her picts the difficult life of a black ser-
owner and started a rumor that she vant in a wealthy Christian house-
had fled North. hold. Formerly thought to be autobi-
ographical, it is now understood to
Terrified of being caught and be a work of fiction.
sent back to slavery and punish-
ment, she spent almost seven Like Jacobs, Wilson did not pub-
years hidden in her master’s town, lish under her own name (Our Nig
in the tiny dark attic of her grand- was ironic), and her work was over-
mother’s house. She was sustained

45

looked until recently. The same can be said of and used as propaganda, these slave narratives
the work of most of the women writers of the era.
Noted African-American scholar Henry Louis were well-known in the years just before the Civil
Gates, Jr. — in his role of spearheading the black
fiction project — reissued Our Nig in 1983. War. Douglass’s narrative is vivid and highly liter-

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) ate, and it gives unique insights into the mentali-

The most famous black American anti-slavery ty of slavery and the agony that institution caused
leader and orator of the era, Frederick Douglass
was born a slave on a Maryland plantation. It was among blacks.
his good fortune to be sent to relatively liberal
Baltimore as a young man, where he learned to The slave narrative was the first black literary
read and write. Escaping to Massachusetts in
1838, at age 21, Douglass was helped by abolition- prose genre in the United States. It helped blacks
ist editor William Lloyd Garrison and began to
lecture for anti-slavery societies. in the difficult task of establishing an African-

In 1845, he published his Narrative of the Life American identity in white America, and it has
of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (sec-
ond version 1855, revised in 1892), the best and continued to exert an important influence on
most popular of many “slave narratives.” Often
dictated by illiterate blacks to white abolitionists black fictional techniques and themes through-

out the 20th century. The search for identity, an-

ger against discrimination, and sense of living an

invisible, hunted, underground life unacknowl-

edged by the white majority, have recurred in the

works of such 20th-century black American au-

thors as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph

Ellison, and Toni Morrison. ■

46

CHAPTER thereafter — flowed into the United States
between 1860 and 1910. Chinese, Japanese, and
5 Filipino contract laborers were imported by
Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies,
THE RISE OF REALISM: and other American business interests on the
1860-1914 West Coast.

The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) between the In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in
industrial North and the agricultural, small villages, but by 1919 half of the population
slave-owning South was a watershed in was concentrated in about 12 cities. Problems
American history. The innocent optimism of the of urbanization and industrialization appeared:
young democratic nation gave way, after the war, poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary con-
to a period of exhaustion. American idealism ditions, low pay (called “wage slavery”), difficult
remained but was rechanneled. Before the war, working conditions, and inadequate restraints on
idealists championed human rights, especially business. Labor unions grew, and strikes brought
the abolition of slavery; after the war, Americans the plight of working people to national aware-
increasingly idealized progress and the self- ness. Farmers, too, saw themselves struggling
made man. This was the era of the million- against the “money interests” of the East, the
aire manufacturer and the speculator, when so-called robber barons like J.P. Morgan and John
Darwinian evolution and the “survival of the D. Rockefeller. Their eastern banks tightly con-
fittest” seemed to sanction the sometimes trolled mortgages and credit so vital to western
unethical methods of the successful business development and agriculture, while railroad
tycoon. companies charged high prices to transport farm
products to the cities. The farmer gradually
Business boomed after the war. War produc- became an object of ridicule, lampooned as an
tion had boosted industry in the North and given unsophisticated “hick” or “rube.” The ideal
it prestige and political clout. It also gave indus- American of the post-Civil War period became
trial leaders valuable experience in the manage- the millionaire. In 1860, there were fewer than
ment of men and machines. The enormous nat- 100 millionaires; by 1875, there were more than
ural resources — iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver 1,000.
— of the American land benefitted business.
The new intercontinental rail system, inaugurat- From 1860 to 1914, the United States was trans-
ed in 1869, and the transcontinental telegraph, formed from a small, young, agricultural ex-
which began operating in 1861, gave industry colony to a huge, modern, industrial nation. A
access to materials, markets, and communica- debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the
tions. The constant influx of immigrants provided world’s wealthiest state, with a population that
a seemingly endless supply of inexpensive labor had more than doubled, rising from 31 million in
as well. Over 23 million foreigners — German, 1860 to 76 million in 1900. By World War I, the
Scandinavian, and Irish in the early years, and United States had become a major world power.
increasingly Central and Southern Europeans
As industrialization grew, so did alienation.
Characteristic American novels of the period —
Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,
Jack London’s Martin Eden, and later Theodore
Dreiser’s An American Tragedy — depict the
damage of economic forces and alienation on

47

the weak or vulnerable individual. S(AMMAURELK CTWLEAMIENN)S with society. The most well-known
Survivors, like Twain’s Huck Finn, example is Huck Finn, a poor boy
Humphrey Vanderveyden in Lon- Illustration by who decides to follow the voice of
don’s The Sea-Wolf, and Dreiser’s Thaddeus A. Miksinski, Jr. his conscience and help a Negro
opportunistic Sister Carrie, endure slave escape to freedom, even
through inner strength involving though Huck thinks this means that
kindness, flexibility, and, above all, he will be damned to hell for break-
individuality. ing the law.

SAMUEL CLEMENS Twain’s masterpiece, which ap-
(MARK TWAIN) (1835-1910) peared in 1884, is set in the Mis-
sissippi River village of St. Peters-
Samuel Clemens, better known burg. The son of an alcoholic bum,
by his pen name of Mark Huck has just been adopted by a
Twain, grew up in the respectable family when his father,
Mississippi River frontier town of in a drunken stupor, threatens to
Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest kill him. Fearing for his life, Huck
Hemingway’s famous statement escapes, feigning his own death. He
that all of American literature is joined in his escape by another
comes from one great book, outcast, the slave Jim, whose
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry owner, Miss Watson, is thinking of
Finn, indicates this author’s tower- selling him down the river to the
ing place in the tradition. Ear- harsher slavery of the deep South.
ly 19th-century American writers Huck and Jim float on a raft down
tended to be too flowery, senti- the majestic Mississippi, but are
mental, or ostentatious — partially sunk by a steamboat, separated,
because they were still trying to and later reunited. They go through
prove that they could write as ele- many comical and dangerous shore
gantly as the English. Twain’s style, adventures that show the variety,
based on vigorous, realistic, col- generosity, and sometimes cruel ir-
loquial American speech, gave rationality of society. In the end, it
American writers a new apprecia- is discovered that Miss Watson had
tion of their national voice. Twain already freed Jim, and a respec-
was the first major author to come table family is taking care of the
from the interior of the country, wild boy Huck. But Huck grows
and he captured its distinctive, impatient with civilized society and
humorous slang and iconoclasm. plans to escape to “the territories”
— Indian lands. The ending gives
For Twain and other American the reader the counter-version of
writers of the late 19th century, the classic American success myth:
realism was not merely a literary the open road leading to the pris-
technique: It was a way of speaking tine wilderness, away from the
truth and exploding worn-out con- morally corrupting influences of
ventions. Thus it was profoundly “civilization.” James Fenimore
liberating and potentially at odds

48

Cooper’s novels, Walt Whitman’s hymns to the FRONTIER HUMOR AND REALISM
open road, William Faulkner’s The Bear, and
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road are other literary Two major literary currents in 19th-century
examples. America merged in Mark Twain: popular
frontier humor and local color, or “region-
Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless liter- alism.” These related literary approaches began
ary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a story of in the 1830s — and had even earlier roots in
death, rebirth, and initiation. The escaped slave, local oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages,
Jim, becomes a father figure for Huck; in decid- on riverboats, in mining camps, and around cow-
ing to save Jim, Huck grows morally beyond the boy campfires far from city amusements, story-
bounds of his slave-owning society. It is Jim’s telling flourished. Exaggeration, tall tales, in-
adventures that initiate Huck into the com- credible boasts, and comic workingmen heroes
plexities of human nature and give him moral enlivened frontier literature. These humorous
courage. forms were found in many frontier regions — in
the “old Southwest” (the present-day inland
The novel also dramatizes Twain’s ideal of the South and the lower Midwest), the mining fron-
harmonious community: “What you want, above tier, and the Pacific Coast. Each region had its
all things, on a raft is for everybody to be satis- colorful characters around whom stories collect-
fied and feel right and kind toward the others.” ed: Mike Fink, the Mississippi riverboat brawler;
Like Melville’s ship the Pequod, the raft sinks, Casey Jones, the brave railroad engineer; John
and with it that special community. The pure, Henry, the steel-driving African-American; Paul
simple world of the raft is ultimately over- Bunyan, the giant logger whose fame was helped
whelmed by progress — the steamboat — but along by advertising; westerners Kit Carson, the
the mythic image of the river remains, as vast and Indian fighter, and Davy Crockett, the scout.
changing as life itself. Their exploits were exaggerated and enhanced in
ballads, newspapers, and magazines. Sometimes,
The unstable relationship between reality and as with Kit Carson and Davy Crockett, these sto-
illusion is Twain’s characteristic theme, the basis ries were strung together into book form.
of much of his humor. The magnificent yet
deceptive, constantly changing river is also the Twain, Faulkner, and many other writers, par-
main feature of his imaginative landscape. In Life ticularly southerners, are indebted to frontier
on the Mississippi, Twain recalls his training as a pre-Civil War humorists such as Johnson Hooper,
young steamboat pilot when he writes: “I went to George Washington Harris, Augustus Longstreet,
work now to learn the shape of the river; and Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and Joseph Baldwin.
of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that From them and the American frontier folk came
ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the wild proliferation of comical new American
the chief.” words: “absquatulate” (leave), “flabbergasted”
(amazed), “rampagious” (unruly, rampaging).
Twain’s moral sense as a writer echoes his Local boasters, or “ring-tailed roarers,” who
pilot’s responsibility to steer the ship to safety. asserted they were half horse, half alligator, also
Samuel Clemens’s pen name, “Mark Twain,” is underscored the boundless energy of the fron-
the phrase Mississippi boatmen used to signify tier. They drew strength from natural hazards
two fathoms (3.6 meters) of water, the depth that would terrify lesser men. “I’m a regular tor-
needed for a boat’s safe passage. Twain’s nado,” one swelled, “tough as hickory and long-
serious purpose combined with a rare genius for winded as a nor’wester. I can strike a blow like a
humor and style keep Twain’s writing fresh and
appealing.

49