authors

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

American poet that was influenced somewhat by the transcendentalism occurring at the time. He was important in building the status of American literature.

William Cullen Bryant

Journalist, Humanitarian, Poet of Nature, First Mature Romantic, Not a Fireside poet

James Fennimore Cooper

Major U.S. novelist, created U.S. frontier myth, Yale @ 13, famous for Leather-Stocking Tales

Ralph Waldo Emerson

American transcendentalist, against slavery, stressed self-reliance, optimism, self-improvement, self-confidence, and freedom, prime example of a transcendentalist, helped further the movement.

Henry David Thoreau

American transcendentalist, against a government that supported slavery, wrote down his beliefs in Walden, started the movement of civil-disobedience when he refused to pay the toll-tax to support him Mexican War.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Originally a transcendentalist; later rejected them and became a leading anti-transcendentalist, descendant of Puritan settlers, The Scarlet Letter

Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick; Typee, a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and

Immanuel Kant

invented transcendentalism, Greatest German philosopher of Enlightenment, separated science and morality into separate branches of knowledge, science could describe nature, it could not provide a guide for morality, wrote Critique of Pure Reason

Edgar Allen Poe

Orphaned at young age, American poet, considered part of the American Romantic Movement, failing at suicide, began drinking, died in Baltimore shortly after being found drunk in a gutter.