Literature: An American Renaissance

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Literature: An American Renaissance

American Literature for an American People. In the early years of the nineteenth century American authors such as William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), Washington Irving (1783-1759), and James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) achieved critical recognition in America and England for their literary merits. While they saw the need for an American literature that treated issues and depicted scenes that were distinctively American, these writers modeled their own poetry or fiction after that of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and other well-known British writers of the time. Yet by 1837, the year in which Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) published his “American Scholar” address, the United States was well on its way to having its own national voice in literature. In “The American Scholar” Emerson proclaimed that “our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” expressing a sentiment widely shared by Americans of his time. With the population of the United States more than doubling from nearly 13 million in 1830 to nearly 39.9 million 1870, there had developed an audience of American readers that could sustain a significant number of professional authors, many of whom achieved fame and fortune by responding to Americans’ desire to read about their own country.

THOREAU IN THE WOODS

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) has been called the finest example of American nature writing and the first great example of modern American prose. Readers still enjoy Thoreau’s account of self-sufficiency and solitude in the woods and long for the simple communion with nature that the book celebrates. Yet during his two years in a cabin by Walden Pond (1846-1847), Thoreau was never as independent or as alone as his book suggests. Living only a mile or two from the village of Concord, Massachusetts, he visited his neighbors there nearly every day. He often arrived at the Emersons’ or Alcotts’ home in time to be invited for dinner. Though Walden gives the impression that he grew or caught most of his own food, the meals he ate in his cabin came mainly from the fresh provisions that his mother and sister brought him every Saturday.

One incident alone must have convinced the people of Concord that Thoreau lacked the necessary skills to be a self-sufficient woodsman. One day, planning to cook some fish he had caught, Thoreau started a fire in a hollowed-out tree stump and accidentally burned three hundred acres of woods.

Source: Karen L. Rood, ed., American Literary Almanac, from 1608 to the Present (New York & Oxford: Facts on File, 1988).

Transcendentalism on the Wane. New England Transcendentalism originated in the area around Concord, Massachusetts. Never a fully organized movement, the Transcendentalists were a group of highly individualistic writers—including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), and George Ripley (1802-1880)—with a loosely related set of principles. Though they often disagreed, they shared the belief that people can “transcend” the limits of the senses and discover higher truths directly through intuition, rather than through participation in a conventional church. From 1836 through 1855 Transcendentalism developed into a full-scale rejection of the established order. Its message was in accord with the frontier spirit of the young United States, whose citizens shared the conviction that through self-reliance and determination, Americans could create a new and improved society for themselves. By 1850, however, Transcendentalism was in decline. Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), an early American feminist and co-editor of the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial, died in that year, and Emerson, though still active as a lecturer, had gradually become less productive as a writer since the death of his five-year-old son, Waldo, in 1842. During the 1850s, as the debate over the extension of slavery to new states and territories became more and more heated, Americans increasingly lost patience with the naive optimism generally associated with Transcendentalist

thought. The best-known Transcendentalist literary work, Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), an account of his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond, near Concord, is also one of the last significant literary productions to come from the group.

Hawthorne’s Power of Darkness. During the second third of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), a native of Salem, Massachusetts, explored complex moral and psychological conflicts in his highly symbolic fiction. After writing an unsuccessful first novel, Fanshawe (1829), and the tales collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), he produced The Scarlet Letter (1850), the novel that is widely regarded as his masterpiece. In this novel and his next, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he examined the gloomy, brooding spirit of Puritanism and the moral consequences of sin. In his next novel, The Blithedale Romance (1852), Hawthorne satirized Transcendentalist ideas, drawing on his own experiences as a member of the Transcendental commune Brook Farm from less than a year in 1841. His final published novel, The Marble Faun (1860), set in Italy, is an early example of the international novel, a genre that American realist Henry James (1843-1916) later employed to compare the cultures of America and Europe. Also widely respected for his short fiction, Hawthorne—along with Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)—helped establish the American short story as a distinctive, important art form.

An Artist in the Rigging. Born in New York City, Herman Melville (1819-1891) wrote his first great books at the same time that Hawthorne published Mosses From an Old Manse and his last in the same decade that Stephen Crane published The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Melville’s grappling with moral issues was as profound as Hawthorne’s, and his view of life was darker and more realistic. Melville’s youthful experiences on a whaling ship (1841-1842) and ashore in the Marquesas (where he was captured by cannibals) and other South Sea islands led him to write Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and other popular romances. Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), the tale of a whaling captain’s obsessive search for the white whale that had dismembered him, is at once a gripping adventure story, a deeply philosophical inquiry into the human condition, an allegory about evil, and one of the most challenging and impenetrable novels ever written. Both Moby-Dick and Melville’s next novel, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), were misunderstood and poorly received by his contemporaries. Though ill, deeply in debt, and disheartened by his failure to win an audience, Melville continued to write, producing such important works as The Piazza Tales (1856)—a short-story collection including “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener”— The Confidence Man (1857), and the novella Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924). After working as a customs inspector in New York City for nineteen years, Melville died poor and obscure. He did not receive the recognition he deserved until more than thirty years after his death, but he has now become the most remarkable example of an author who was forgotten during his lifetime and elevated to the highest rank of American writers after his death.

A Barbaric Yawp. At thirty Walt Whitman (1819-1892), who was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York, began to travel America to record in poetry his impressions of the nation and its people. Whitman printed the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) himself, and throughout his life he continued to publish expansions and revisions of the work. He sent copies of the first edition to well-known literary men, including Emerson, who wrote back, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career” and called the book “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom yet contributed to American literature.” Whitman published Emerson’s letter of praise in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass.