21st AMERICAN WRITERS

Edgar Allan Poe

most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual— a genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849.

James Russell Lowell

was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose todepict everyday life in the Northeast.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes

(2) were the most prominent of the upper- class Brahmins, who filtered their depiction of America through European models and sensibilities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

wrote influential essays

Henry David Thoreau

wrote Walden (1854), an account of his life alone by Walden Pond.

Margaret Fuller

was editor of The Dial, an important Transcendentalist magazine

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman

Three men——began publishing novels, short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of the most-enduring works of American literature.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

As a young man, he published short stories, most notable among them the allegorical "Young Goodman Brown" (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with the Transcendentalists before he started writing his two most significant novels—The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Herman Melville

was one of Hawthorne's friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was also a strong influence on Melville's Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville's early life of traveling and writing.

Walt Whitman

wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the traditional constraints of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855), and his frankness in subject matter and tone repelled some critics. But the book, which went through many subsequent editions, became a landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized the ethos of the Romantic period.

William Wells Brown

published what is considered the first black American novel, Clotel, in 1853. He also wrote the first African American play to be published, The Escape (1858)

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson

In 1859 (2) became the first black women to publish fiction in the United States. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published serially 1851-52, is credited with raising opposition in the North to slavery.

Emily Dickinson

lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived largely in seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886; and she was a woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene