Washington Irving
He [William Cullen Bryant] himself was overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington Irving.
“Washington Irving, 19th-century print Described as the ‘first American man of letters, Washington Irving is best known for ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’ which have been called the first American short stories.
American Renaissance
“The authors who began to come to prominence in the 1830s and were active until about the end of the Civil War—the humorists, the classic New Englanders, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—did their work in a new spirit, and their achievements were of a new sort. In part this was because they were in some way influenced by the broadening democratic concepts that in 1829 triumphed in Andrew Jackson’s inauguration as president. In part it was because, in this Romantic period of emphasis upon native scenes and characters in many literatures, they put much of America into their books. …
Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“History also figured in tales and romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the leading New England fictionist of the period. Many tales and longer works—for example, his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter (1850)—- set against a background of colonial America with emphasis upon its distance in time from 19th-century New England. Others, such as The House of the Seven Gables (1851), dealt with the past as well as the present. Still others, such as The Marble Faun (1860), were set in distant countries. Remote though they were at times from what Hawthorne called ‘the light of common day,’ they showed deep psychological insight and probed into complex ethical problems.
Herman Melviille
“Another great American fiction writer, for a time a neighbor and associate of Hawthorne, was Herman Melville. After relatively little schooling, Melville went to sea; a whaling ship, as he put it, was his “Yale College and his Harvard.” His first books were fiction in the guise of factual writing based upon experiences as a sailor—Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847); so were such later works as Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850). Between 1846 and 1851, however, Melville’s reading in philosophy and literary classics, as well as in Hawthorne’s allegorical and symbolic writings, gave him new interests and aims. The first sign of this interest was Mardi (1849), an uneven and disjointed transitional book that used allegory after the model of Rabelais to comment upon ideas afloat in the period—about nations, politics, institutions, literature, and religion. The new techniques came to fruition in Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a richly symbolic work, complex but brilliantly integrated. Only in short stories, Benito Cereno—a masterpiece of its genre—and others, in the psychological novel Pierre (1852), and in the novelette Billy Budd (written 1890?) was Melville later to show sporadic flashes of the genius that created Moby Dick.
Walt Whitman
“Walt Whitman, c. 1870 – One of the most important American literary figures of the 19th century, Walt Whitman was inspired by the Romantic concept of a poet as prophet. His Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, transformed American poetry.
An ardent singer of the praise of Manhattan, Walt Whitman saw less of the dark side of life than Melville did. He was a believer in Jacksonian democracy, in the splendor of the common man. Inspired by the Romantic concept of a poet as prophet and also by the Transcendental philosophy of Emerson, Whitman in 1855 published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. As years passed, nine revised and expanded editions of this work were published. This autobiography in verse was intended to show the ideas, beliefs, emotions, and experiences of the common man in a great period of American individualism. Whitman had a hard time winning a following because he was frank and unconventional in his Transcendental thinking, because he used free verse rather than rhymed or regularly metered verse, and because his poems were not conventionally organized. Nevertheless, he steadily gained the approval of critics and in time came to be recognized as one of the great poets of America. …
George Washington Cable
From The 19th century
in
American literature
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