The Blossoming of American Literature
During the early 1800s, American literature began to divide
from its British roots. Washington Irving and James
Fenimore Cooper helped carve out the early territory of American literature,
using distinctly American literary themes. Washington Irving achieved
international acclaim, writing often satirical accounts of life
in colonial New York. Two of his most famous stories are “Rip Van
Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” James Fenimore Cooper,
the author of The Pioneers (1823) and The
Last of the Mohicans (1826), is credited with creating
the first western hero. In “The American Scholar” (1837), Ralph Waldo
Emerson lauded such American literary advances and urged American
authors to continue setting their own course.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
and Edgar Allan Poe emerged in the late 1840s and early
1850s as prominent writers of fiction. They portrayed individuals
as conflicted and obsessive, proud and guilt-ridden. In The
Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, Hawthorne explores the
moral dilemmas of an adulterous Puritan minister. Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851)
portrays a sea captain’s tortured obsession. Poe’s macabre short
stories and poems, including “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The
Raven” (1844), examine depravity and moral corruption.
Prominent essayists and poets also emerged during the
1840s and 1850s. Two of the most renowned essayists were the Transcendentalists
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (discussed in the Transcendentalism
section), who favored emotion and intuition over pure logic. The
poet Walt Whitman, a follower of Emerson, celebrated
America for producing a new type of democratic man uncorrupted by
European vice in his compilation of poems, Leaves of Grass,
published in 1855.
