Emergence of American Literature

• The decades before the Civil War saw a number of American literary masterpieces, a period now referred to as the "American Renaissance" of literature.
• The American Renaissance is often associated with American romanticism and transcendentalism.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American writer and philanthropist, the author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contributed so much to popular feeling against slavery that it is cited among the causes of the American Civil War.
• Literary nationalists at the time were calling for a movement that would develop a unique American literary style to distinguish American literature from British literature.
• Authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson wrote their best famous works during the American Renaissance.
• In recent years, female authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe have been added to the list of great authors from the period of the American Renaissance.
• Many writers were drawn to transcendentalism, expressing its ideas through new stories, poems, essays, and articles.
• The ideas of transcendentalism were able to permeate American thought and culture through a prolific print culture, which allowed the wide dissemination of magazines and journals.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.
• Emerson published "Nature", an essay arguing that humans can find their true spirituality in nature, not in the everyday bustling working world of Jacksonian democracy and industrial transformation.
• In 1841, Emerson published his essay "Self-Reliance," which urges readers to think for themselves and reject the mass conformity and mediocrity taking root in American life.
• Henry David Thoreau was among those attracted to Emerson’s ideas, and Emerson encouraged Thoreau to write about his own ideas.
• In 1849, Emerson published his lecture “Civil Disobedience” and urged readers to refuse to support a government that was immoral.
• Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" metaphorically describes hope as a bird that rests in the soul, sings continuously and never demands anything even in the direst circumstances.
• Emily Dickinson took definition as her province and challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet's work.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe is known for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
• The most famous poem by Emily Dickinson, "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" is ranked among the greatest poems in the English language.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe was a prominent author during the time of the American Civil War.
• One of the poems in Leaves of Grass, "Song of Myself," emphasized individualism, which for Whitman, was a goal achieved by uniting the individual with all other people through a transcendent bond.
• Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, a collection of twelve poems that celebrated the subjective experience of the individual.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.
• Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale emphasized the perils of individual obsession by telling the tale of Captain Ahab's single-minded quest to kill a white whale, Moby Dick, which had destroyed Ahab's original ship and caused him to lose one of his legs.
• Hawthorne's fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and more specifically, Dark Romanticism.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne is known for his novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
• Emily Dickinson is one of America's greatest and most original poets of all time.
• Edgar Allan Poe, a popular author, critic, and poet, decried, "the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists."
• Some works of Edgar Allan Poe include The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Fall of the House of Usher.