American Writers - LIT

Henry David Thoreau

Years = 1817-1862

Known For = Transcendentalism. American essayist, poet, and philosopher advocating for spiritual connections with surroundings

Cause = Simplicity, awake, live in the moment, the “awakening” of the people

Home, Land, Nature = Concord, MA,

Emphasized being out in nature, Walden Pond. Being one with nature is being alive and awake

Key Quote: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

Edgar Allan Poe

Years = 1809-1849

Known For = His short stories are full of mystery and themes of death. He writes about domestic horror and morality, your conscience catching up to you; early horror stories; father or detective fiction

Cause = Present new perspectives, specifically on the concept of home and safety. First American writer to earn a living on writing alone

Home, Land, Nature = Born in Boston, died in Baltimore - suffered a ton from loss, trauma; land is full of possible horrors

Key Quote: “It’s true!” “a madman cannot plan”

Phillis Wheatley (Girl)

Years = 1753-1784

Known For = First African American author; abolitionist, friends with Occum; praises Christianity in her writing

Cause = She wrote to draw attention to the plight of slaves in America, using her personal experiences

Home, Land, Nature = Born in Gambia, later lived in Boston, MA. Culture clash?

Key Quote (s) = “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.”

“Twas Mercy Brought me from my Pagan land”

Frederick Douglass

Years = 1818-1895

Known For = Former slave who became an important speaker, author, and activist for abolition; boycotts sugar for most of his life because of its connection to the slave trade

Cause = He wrote the because he wanted share his perspective of being slave, to correct wrongs e.g. enslaved people who sing are not singing out of happiness; describes violence but matter-of-factly

Home, Land, Nature = Born in Talbot County Maryland. He later lived in New York, Massachusetts, and Washington D.C., where he died.

Birthday: February 1818

He chose his birthday to be on valentines day

Key Quote:?

Emily Dickinson

Years = 1830-1886

Known For = Writing poems, isolation, enjambment; focuses on themes of death, religion, nature, god, doubt; writes in ballad form

Cause = Think more complicated about simple things, ex. What happens when we die, what does it mean to actually be devoted to a religion

Home, Land, Nature = Born and died in Massachusetts, home is a source of “infinite power” she commonly references nature in her writings, comparisons

Key Quotes: “Hope is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul”

“For I have the power to kill, Without - the power to die -”

“Some keep the sabbath going to church…”

Cherokee Citizens

Years = 1829 - 1839

Known For = Passionate noble successful fight that ultimately didn't affect them being pushed off their own lands

Cause = Want to show the White settlers their opposition to westward removal; speak in defiance before Congress; they are successful by Andrew Jackson overrides the vote and the Trail of Tears ensues; gold in Georgia is the immediate prompt to push off the land

Home, Land, Nature = Georgia, later moved to reservations in the west. Worship the land and nature (part of their religion)

Key Quotes = “Whatever the white man wanted and asked of the Indian, The latter willingly gave. At that time the Indian was the lord, and the white man the suppliant. But now the scene has changed. The strength of the red man, is now the weakness”

Samson Occum

Years = 1723-1792

Known For =

• One of the first ordained Christian Indian ministers.

• Made New England Christian Indian School; is a native preacher and writes his autobiography in English

Cause = Show his devotion to religion, speak out against unfair pay or treatment as compared to write ministers and missionaries

Home, Land, Nature = Born in a Mohegan tribe New London and Norwich Connecticut, later converts to christianity

Key Quotes = “I believe it is because I am a poor Indian”

Mary Rowlandson

Years = 1637-1711

Known For = Her narrative of her capture by Native Americans conveyed conflicts between puritans and Natives around the time of King Philip’s war building

Cause = Convey to others, her spiritual meaning of her experience as a captive

Home, Land, Nature = Born in Somerset, England

Went to America (Salem, MA) with her parents when she was a child. When she got captured, she traveled with the Native Americans up the Connecticut river to New Hampshire.

Died in Wethersfield, Connecticut

Key Quotes: “It is a solemn sight to see so many Christians lying in their blood, some here, and some there, like a company of sheep torn by wolves, all of them stripped naked by a company of hell-hounds, roaring, singing, ranting, and insulting, as if they would have torn our very hearts out; yet the Lord by His almighty power preserved a number of us from death, for there were twenty-four of us taken alive and carried captive.”

Anne Bradstreet

Years = 1612-1672

Known For = ‘Prologue’ first american writer

Revolutionary for being a woman writer in a time when few women were educated in reading and writing; religion; writes about relationship between nature and God, revolutionary for expressing doubt in writing

Cause = Religion and the effect of nature, the place of her writing in the literature of the time, a woman’s place and ability, the role of the family, nature and the relationship between it and humans.

Home, Land, Nature = Comparing house/family to nest and birds, herself and husband to animals, (relationship/comparison between nature and human life, acknowledging similarities.) Land/home belongs to God, (verses on the burning of our house)

Bay Colony; puritan settlement in America

Key Quotes: “Farewell, my birds, farewell adieu, I happy am, if well with you.”

“I had eight birds hatched in one nest,”

“Great was my care when I you fed, Long did I keep you soft and warm, And with my wings kept off all herm, My cares are more and fears than ever.”

Verses upon the burning of the house “my hope and treasure lies above” extended metaphor of earthly home to metaphoric home in heaven

Red Jacket

Years = 1796

Known For = Letter from chief to gentleman missionary from Massachusetts that lists various injustices committed against the Native Americans by the Colonists but is gentle in his language

Cause = Native Americans felt oppressed by the Colonist’s and were fed up with their land being stolen

Home, Land, Nature = Born in New York 1758 died in New York in 1830. Determined to stop the colonists from taking his land

Key Quotes: “Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit; if there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agree, as you can all read the book?”

Zitkala-Sa

Years = 1876-1938

Known For = was known as a Yankton Dakota writer. She wrote about her experiences regarding her experiences with white influence to her life and community. She was also an educator, a political activist and a renowned violinist.

Cause = Subjection of young native American children to the tragic boarding school system created by white people and how it erased their culture. She was able to look at it from both the perspective of an educator at one of these schools and a student, victimized in the system.

Home, Land, Nature = Born: Yankton Reservation, South Dakota

Died: Washington D.C.

Spent a lot of her education-based life in Indiana. She felt at peace at nature and much more connected to her Yankton-Dakota roots and youth in nature.

Key Quotes: ?

Harriet Jacobs

Years = 1813-1897

Known For = Escaping slavery by hiding in her grandma’s attic for 7 years, writes under the pseudonym Linda Brent

Cause = To help people learn about what slavery is really like and support anti-slavery. Directly addresses “women of the north,” her target audience, universalizing language, writes in dramatic sensory details about Mrs. Flint spitting in the food, making her walk in snow barefoot, depriving the enslaved of basic needs

Home, Land, Nature = Born in Edenton, NC. She was born into slavvery and went through many awful events that eventually led to her running to NC. This is where she hid in her grandma's attic until she began writing.

Key Quotes: “Whatever slavery might do to me, it could not shackle my children.”

“I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks.”

“Reader, I assure you this is no fiction”

Fountain Hughes

Years = 1859-1957

Known For = An American slave who was freed in 1865, was interviewed and recorded for the WPA project in 1949 at age 101

Cause = Showing how horrible slavery truly was from the perspective of a slave, voice his desire for slavery to never occur again, share the terrible way in which slaves were treated like animals

Home, Land, Nature = Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he worked here for several years and then was relocated to Baltimore Maryland in 1881. The land he was enslaved on would not have been a safe place to him, he would have done anything to escape which he eventually did. He probably has poor association with the space and environments on which he worked.

Key Quotes: “If I thought, had any idea, that I'd ever be a slave again, I'd take a gun an' jus end it all right away. Because you're nothing but a dog. You're not a thing but a dog.”

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Years = 1835-1910

Known For = Satire, writer of essays and fiction, sometimes writes in dialect or in vernacular language e.g. in his picaresque Huck Finn

Cause = To point out ironies, especially when they perpetuate injustice

Home, Land, Nature = Nature as a zone in flux, for escape, for self-discovery, for self-invention, masquerade (in Huck Finn)

Key Quotes: “I’ll go to hell”