10- ] American Literature - Edgar Allan Poe

10- ] mAmerican Literature 

Edgar Allan Poe 1809 –1849

Edgar Allan Poe January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. He is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and suspense. He is generally considered the inventor of detective fiction. Poe’s work as an editor, a poet, and a critic had a profound impact on American and international literature. In addition to his detective stories he is one of the originators of horror and science fiction. He is often credited as the architect of the modern short story.

He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and of American literature. He was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Poe was born in Boston, the second child of actors David and Elizabeth "Eliza" Poe. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and when his mother died the following year, Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but he was with them well into young adulthood. He attended the University of Virginia but left after a year due to lack of money. He quarreled with John Allan over the funds for his education, and his gambling debts. In 1827, having enlisted in the United States Army under an assumed name, he published his first collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, credited only to "a Bostonian". Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement after the death of Allan's wife in 1829. Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declared a firm wish to be a poet and writer, and parted ways with Allan.

Poe switched his focus to prose, and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move among several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1836, he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, but she died of tuberculosis in 1847. In January 1845, he published his poem "The Raven" to instant success. He planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), but before it could be produced, he died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, aged 40, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of his death remains unknown, and has been variously attributed to many causes including disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide.

Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as specialized fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.

After his brother's death, Poe began more earnest attempts to start his career as a writer, but he chose a difficult time in American publishing to do so. He was one of the first Americans to live by writing alone and was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law. American publishers often produced unauthorized copies of British works rather than paying for new work by Americans. The industry was also particularly hurt by the Panic of 1837. There was a booming growth in American periodicals around this time, fueled in part by new technology, but many did not last beyond a few issues. Publishers often refused to pay their writers or paid them much later than they promised, and Poe repeatedly resorted to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.

After his early attempts at poetry, Poe had turned his attention to prose, likely based on John Neal's critiques in The Yankee magazine. He placed a few stories with a Philadelphia publication and began work on his only drama Politian. The Baltimore Saturday Visiter awarded him a prize in October 1833 for his short story "MS. Found in a Bottle". The story brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a Baltimorean of considerable means who helped Poe place some of his stories and introduced him to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe became assistant editor of the periodical in August 1835, but White discharged him within a few weeks for being drunk on the job. Poe returned to Baltimore where he obtained a license to marry his cousin Virginia on September 22, 1835, though it is unknown if they were married at that time. He was 26 and she was 13.

Poe was reinstated by White after promising good behavior, and he went back to Richmond with Virginia and her mother. He remained at the Messenger until January 1837. During this period, Poe claimed that its circulation increased from 700 to 3,500. He published several poems, book reviews, critiques, and stories in the paper. On May 16, 1836, he and Virginia held a Presbyterian wedding ceremony performed by Amasa Converse at their Richmond boarding house, with a witness falsely attesting Clemm's age as 21.

Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published and widely reviewed in 1838 . In the summer of 1839, he became assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. He published numerous articles, stories, and reviews, enhancing his reputation as a trenchant critic which he had established at the Messenger. Also in 1839, the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in two volumes, though he made little money from it and it received mixed reviews.

In June 1840, Poe published a prospectus announcing his intentions to start his own journal called The Stylus, although he originally intended to call it The Penn, as it would have been based in Philadelphia. He bought advertising space for his prospectus in the June 6, 1840, issue of Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post: "Prospectus of the Penn Magazine, a Monthly Literary journal to be edited and published in the city of Philadelphia by Edgar A. Poe." The journal was never produced before Poe's death.

Poe left Burton's after about a year and found a position as writer and co-editor at the then-very-successful monthly Graham's Magazine. In the last number of Graham's for 1841, Poe was among the co-signatories to an editorial note of celebration of the tremendous success the magazine had achieved in the past year: "Perhaps the editors of no magazine, either in America or in Europe, ever sat down, at the close of a year, to contemplate the progress of their work with more satisfaction than we do now. Our success has been unexampled, almost incredible. We may assert without fear of contradiction that no periodical ever witnessed the same increase during so short a period."

Around this time, Poe attempted to secure a position within the administration of President John Tyler, claiming that he was a member of the Whig Party. He hoped to be appointed to the United States Custom House in Philadelphia with help from President Tyler's son Robert, an acquaintance of Poe's friend Frederick Thomas. Poe failed to show up for a meeting with Thomas to discuss the appointment in mid-September 1842, claiming to have been sick, though Thomas believed that he had been drunk . Poe was promised an appointment, but all positions were filled by others.

One evening in January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of consumption, or tuberculosis, while singing and playing the piano, which Poe described as breaking a blood vessel in her throat. She only partially recovered, and Poe began to drink more heavily under the stress of her illness. He left Graham's and attempted to find a new position, for a time angling for a government post. He returned to New York where he worked briefly at the Evening Mirror before becoming editor of the Broadway Journal, and later its owner .There Poe alienated himself from other writers by publicly accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, though Longfellow never responded. On January 29, 1845, Poe's poem "The Raven" appeared in the Evening Mirror and became a popular sensation. It made Poe a household name almost instantly, though he was paid only $9 for its publication. It was concurrently published in The American Review: A Whig Journal under the pseudonym "Quarles".

The Broadway Journal failed in 1846, and Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham, New York, in the Bronx. That home, now known as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, was relocated in later years to a park near the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road. Nearby, Poe befriended the Jesuits at St. John's College, now Fordham University. Virginia died at the cottage on January 30, 1847. Biographers and critics often suggest that Poe's frequent theme of the "death of a beautiful woman" stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his wife.

Poe was increasingly unstable after his wife's death. He attempted to court poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement failed, purportedly because of Poe's drinking and erratic behavior. There is also strong evidence that Whitman's mother intervened and did much to derail their relationship. Poe then returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster.

Literary style and themes

Genres

Poe's best-known fiction works are Gothic horror adhering to the genre's conventions to appeal to the public taste. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism which Poe strongly disliked. He referred to followers of the transcendental movement as "Frog-Pondians", after the pond on Boston Common, and ridiculed their writings as "metaphor—run mad," lapsing into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "mysticism for mysticism's sake". Poe once wrote in a letter to Thomas Holley Chivers that he did not dislike transcendentalists, "only the pretenders and sophists among them".

Beyond horror, Poe also wrote satires, humor tales, and hoaxes. For comic effect, he used irony and ludicrous extravagance, often in an attempt to liberate the reader from cultural conformity. "Metzengerstein" is the first story that Poe is known to have published and his first foray into horror, but it was originally intended as a burlesque satirizing the popular genre .Poe also reinvented science fiction, responding in his writing to emerging technologies such as hot air balloons in "The Balloon-Hoax".

Poe wrote much of his work using themes aimed specifically at mass-market tastes. To that end, his fiction often included elements of popular pseudo-sciences, such as phrenology and physiognomy.

Literary theory

Poe's writing reflects his literary theories, which he presented in his criticism and also in essays such as "The Poetic Principle". He disliked didacticism and allegory, though he believed that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface. Works with obvious meanings, he wrote, cease to be art. He believed that work of quality should be brief and focus on a specific single effect. To that end, he believed that the writer should carefully calculate every sentiment and idea.

Poe describes his method in writing "The Raven" in the essay "The Philosophy of Composition", and he claims to have strictly followed this method. It has been questioned whether he really followed this system, however. T. S. Eliot said: "It is difficult for us to read that essay without reflecting that if Poe plotted out his poem with such calculation, he might have taken a little more pains over it: the result hardly does credit to the method." Biographer Joseph Wood Krutch described the essay as "a rather highly ingenious exercise in the art of rationalization".

Much of Poe’s best work is concerned with terror and sadness, but in ordinary circumstances the poet was a pleasant companion. He talked brilliantly, chiefly of literature, and read his own poetry and that of others in a voice of surpassing beauty. He admired Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. He had a sense of humour, apologizing to a visitor for not keeping a pet raven. If the mind of Poe is considered, the duality is still more striking. On one side, he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitivity to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired his most touching lyrics (“To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” “Eulalie,” “To One in Paradise”) and the full-toned prose hymns to beauty and love in “Ligeia” and “Eleonora.” In “Israfel” his imagination carried him away from the material world into a dreamland. This Pythian mood was especially characteristic of the later years of his life.

List of selected works

Short stories

"The Black Cat"

"The Cask of Amontillado"

"A Descent into the Maelström"

"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"

"The Fall of the House of Usher"

"The Gold-Bug"

"Hop-Frog"

"The Imp of the Perverse"

"Ligeia"

"The Masque of the Red Death"

"Morella"

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"

"Never Bet the Devil Your Head"

"The Oval Portrait"

"The Pit and the Pendulum"

"The Premature Burial"

"The Purloined Letter"

"The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether"

"The Tell-Tale Heart"

"Loss of Breath"

Poetry

"Al Aaraaf"

"Annabel Lee"

"The Bells"

"The City in the Sea"

"The Conqueror Worm"

"A Dream Within a Dream"

"Eldorado"

"Eulalie"

"The Haunted Palace"

"To Helen"

"Lenore"

"Tamerlane"

"The Raven"

"Ulalume"

Other works

Politian (1835) – Poe's only play

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) – Poe's only complete novel

The Journal of Julius Rodman (1840) – Poe's second, unfinished novel

"The Balloon-Hoax" (1844) – A journalistic hoax printed as a true story

"The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) – Essay

Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848) – Essay

"The Poetic Principle" (1848) – Essay

"The Light-House" (1849) – Poe's last, incomplete work

9- ] American Literature - Nathaniel Hawthorne

9- ] American Literature

1 - ] Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 – 1864

Nathaniel Hawthorne  was a novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne’s works have been labelled ‘dark romanticism,’ dominated as they are by cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humankind. His novels and stories, set in a past New England, are versions of historical fiction used as a vehicle to express themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution.

Although his natural inclination was to express himself through the short story form, he is best known for his novels, and particularly his most famous, The Scarlet Letter, a romance in an historical setting – puritan Boston, Massachusetts, in the 17th century.  It is the story of the unfortunate Hester Prynne, who gives birth to a child as a result of an affair with a preacher, and struggles to create a new life of repentance. The novel explores the themes of sin, guilt, and legalism.  D.H. Lawrence wrote that there could be no more perfect work of the American imagination.

Hawthorne is ranked among the top American writers. He is admired by other writers, particularly, as a skillful craftsman with an admirable sense of form, which is highly architectural. The structure of his novels, The Scarlet Letter being a striking example, is so tightly integrated that it would be impossible to omit any paragraph without doing damage to the whole. The book’s four characters are inextricably bound together in a complex situation that seems to be insoluble, and the tightly woven plot has a unity of action that rises slowly but inexorably to a highly dramatic climactic scene. In the short stories, too, there is that tight construction. Hawthorne is admired, too for the directness of his writing, and its clarity

Hawthorne’s greatness is due partly to his moral insight. He was deeply concerned with original sin and guilt and the claims of law and conscience. He delved deeply and honestly into life, in which he saw much suffering and conflict but also the redeeming power of love. He is uncompromising in his presentation of those things, firmly and resolutely scrutinizing the psychological and moral facts of the human condition. His greatest short stories and The Scarlet Letter are characterized by a depth of psychological and moral insight unequalled by any other American writer.

Early Career

For the next 12 years, Hawthorne lived in comparative isolation in an upstairs chamber at his mother's house, where he worked at perfecting his writing craft. He also began keeping notebooks or journals, a habit he continued throughout his life. He often jotted down ideas and descriptions, and his words are now a rich source of information about his themes, ideas, style experiments, and subjects.

In 1828, he published his first novel, Fanshaw: A Tale, at his own expense. Fanshaw was a short, imitation Gothic novel and poorly written. Dissatisfied with this novel, Hawthorne attempted to buy up all the copies so that no one could read it. He did not publish another novel for almost 25 years. By 1838, he had written two-thirds of the short stories he was to write in his lifetime. None of these stories gained him much attention, and he could not interest a publisher in printing a collection of his tales until 1837, when his college friend Horatio Bridge backed the publishing of Twice-Told Tales, a collection of Hawthorne's stories that had been published separately in magazines. His schoolmate and friend, Longfellow, reviewed the book with glowing terms. Edgar Allan Poe, known for his excoriating reviews of writers, not only wrote warmly of Hawthorne's book but also took the opportunity to define the short story in his now famous review. Twice-Told Tales is considered a masterpiece of literature, and it contains unmistakably American stories.

Financial Burdens and Marriage

In 1838, Hawthorne met Sophia Amelia Peabody, and the following year they were engaged. It was at this time that Hawthorne invested a thousand dollars of his meager capital in the Brook Farm Community at West Roxbury. There he became acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the naturalist Henry David Thoreau. These transcendentalist thinkers influenced much of Hawthorne's thinking about the importance of intuition rather than intellect in uncovering the truths of nature and human beings. Hawthorne left this experiment in November 1841, disillusioned with the viewpoint of the community, exhausted from the work, and without financial hope that he could support a wife. From this experience, however, he gained the setting for a later novel, The Blithedale Romance.

In a trip to Boston after leaving Brook Farm, Hawthorne reached an understanding about a salary for future contributions to the Democratic Review. He and Sophia married in Boston on July 9, 1842, and left for Concord, Massachusetts, where they took up residence in the now-famous "Old Manse."

"Old Manse"

Hawthorne's life at the "Old Manse" was happy and productive, and these were some of the happiest years of his life. He was newly married, in love with his wife, and surrounded by many of the leading literary figures of the day: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. During this time, Hawthorne wrote for the Democratic Review and produced some tales that would be published in 1846 in Mosses from an Old Manse.

Financial problems continued to plague the family, however. The birth of their first child, Una, caused Hawthorne to once again seek a financially secure job. With the help of his old friends, Hawthorne was appointed a surveyor for the port of Salem. His son, Julian, was born in 1846. Although the new job eased the financial problems for the family, Hawthorne again found little time to pursue his writing. Nevertheless, during this time, he was already forming ideas for a novel based on his Puritan ancestry and introduced by a preface about the Custom House where he worked. When the Whigs won the 1848 election, Hawthorne lost his position. It was a financial shock to the family, but it fortuitously provided him with time to write The Scarlet Letter.

The Golden Years of Writing

During these years Hawthorne was to write some of the greatest prose of his life. In 1849, Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, which won him much fame and greatly increased his reputation. While warmly received here and abroad, The Scarlet Letter sold only 8,000 copies in Hawthorne's lifetime.

In 1849, when the family moved to Lennox, Massachusetts, Hawthorne made the acquaintance of Herman Melville, a young writer who became a good friend. Hawthorne encouraged the young Melville, who later thanked him by dedicating his book, Moby Dick, to him. During this — the "Little Red House" period in Lennox — Hawthorne wrote The House of the Seven Gables and some minor works that were published in 1851.

Around the time that Nathaniel and Sophia's second daughter, Rose, was born, the family moved to West Newton, where Hawthorne finished and published his novel about the Brook Farm experience, The Blithedale Romance, and also A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys. Because there was little to no literature published for children, Hawthorne's book was unique in this area.

Hawthorne is also admired for his mastery of allegory and symbolism. His characters’ dilemmas and their response to them express larger generalizations about the problems of human existence. The power and gravity with which he deals with that results in true tragedy.

And now, in the 21st century Hawthorne holds a pre-eminent place in American letters. He was a major influence in the artistic development of such writers as Herman Melville, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mary Jane Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor – members of the so-called Hawthorne School. His focus on the past of the nation, especially the Puritan era, his delving into the social and psychological forces underlying human behavior, his reliance on symbols to convey rich and ambivalent value to his stories and romances, his insistence on finding and understanding the sources of humanity ‘s darker side, and his exploration of such themes as isolation, guilt, concealment, social reform, and redemption not only created a following among aspiring writers but also brought him into the nation’s classrooms, where The Scarlet Letter still holds a firm place.

The Scarlet Letter was one of the first mass-produced novels in America and became an instant best seller, selling over 2,500 copies in the first two weeks. It has been praised for its sentimentality and moral purity by the likes of D. H. Lawrence, who said that there could be no more perfect work of the American imagination .Though Edgar Allan Poe -- a fellow author in the Dark Romantic Movement and influential literary critic -- wrote negative reviews of Hawthorne's stories. Poe did not admire stories that were allegorical and moral in nature so his criticism was in form. Though even he begrudgingly acknowledged that Hawthorne's style "is like purity itself." Hawthorne's highest regarded short stories include My Kinsman, Major Molineaux (1832), Young Goodman Brown (1835), Feathertop (1852), and The Minister's Black Veil.

Now I am going to break from my biographical narrative to add a personal note. After a lifetime of reading, Nathaniel Hawthorne has emerged as one of my absolute favorite authors of all time. If you are not having fun while reading Hawthorne you are doing it wrong! For instance, My Kinsman, Major Molineaux is a comic short story and should be enjoyed as such (it does have a "tragic" ending). It's the story of a young "hayseed" on his first visit to the "big city" and he suffers the embarrassments one would expect and few extras thrown in for good measure. It could inspire a Monty Python skit. I think there is a secret to understanding and appreciating Hawthorne's body of work. And I will share that with you. But be warned; he is not a cheap date! You will have to work hard before you can truly love this writer.

The price of admission is that one must read and study over the introductory chapter to The Scarlet Letter, The Custom-House. Then read the Preface to the Second Edition and then -- sorry -- read The Custom-House again. As much as it will not feel like it at the time, if you are a high school student, and your English teacher has asked you to specifically read The Custom-House, it's because he or she loves you and cares about your education (which as Twain famously pointed out, should not be confused with your schooling). You will know that you truly understand those two introductory chapters when you realize the Nathaniel Hawthorne was a mid-1850s Bad Ass who explicitly, purposely, and repeatedly "stuck it to the man", even after, heck especially after they asked him to stop! I also do not think you can properly understand The Scarlet Letter without understanding The Custom-House (and also marking the sins of Hawthorne's forefathers). I assure you, the effort is worth the reward. [And I do offer belated apologies to my sophomore English teacher for my essay entitled, "Why I Hate English Class," which I tendered like a smart-aleck after my first bout with The Custom-House way back in 1981.]

For the record, Hawthorne died in his sleep in 1864 during a tour of the White Mountains in Plymouth, New Hampshire. He was educated at one of my favorite small universities, Bowdoin College, where he was a student from 1821-1824.

Later Writing and Death

In Concord, the Hawthornes found a permanent house, along with nine acres

Recent criticism has focused on Hawthorne's narrative voice, treating it as a self-conscious rhetorical construction, not to be conflated with Hawthorne's own voice. Such an approach recognizes the artistry of the writer, complicating the long-dominant tradition of regarding Hawthorne as a gloomy moralist.

Hawthorne enjoyed a brief but intense friendship with Herman Melville beginning on August 5, 1850, when the two authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend. Melville had just read Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse, which Melville later praised in a famous review, "Hawthorne and His Mosses." Subsequently the two struck up a correspondence initiated by Melville. Melville's letters to Hawthorne provide insight into the composition of how Melville developed his story of the great white whale and its nemesis Captain Ahab, but Hawthorne's letters to Melville did not survive. The correspondence ended shortly after Moby-Dick was published by Harper and Brothers.

When The Whale, first published in England in October 1851, was republished as Moby-Dick in New York one month later, Melville dedicated the book to Hawthorne, “in appreciation for his genius.” Similarities in The House of Seven Gables and the Moby-Dick stories are known and noted in literary and passing circles. The long lost responses to Melville would surely shed more light on this comparison.

Edgar Allan Poe, another contemporary, wrote important but unflattering reviews of both Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. Hawthorne's opinions of Poe's work remains unknown.

Writings

Hawthorne is best-known today for his many short stories (he called them "tales") and his four major romances of 1850–1860: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). (A previous book-length romance, Fanshawe, was published anonymously in 1828. Hawthorne would disown it in later life, going so far as to implore friends who still owned copies to burn it.)

Before publishing his first collection of tales in 1837, Hawthorne wrote scores of short stories and sketches, publishing them anonymously or pseudonymously in periodicals such as The New-England Magazine and The United States Democratic Review. (The editor of the Democratic Review, John L. O'Sullivan, was a close friend of Hawthorne's.) Only after collecting a number of his short stories into the two-volume Twice-Told Tales in 1837 did Hawthorne begin to attach his name to his works.

Much of Hawthorne's work is set in colonial New England, and many of his short stories have been read as moral allegories influenced by his Puritan background. "Ethan Brand" (1850) tells the story of a lime-burner who sets off to find the Unpardonable Sin, and in doing so, commits it. One of Hawthorne's most famous tales, “The Birth-Mark” (1843), concerns a young doctor who removes a birthmark from his wife's face, an operation which kills her. Other well-known tales include "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844), "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832), "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836), "Ethan Brand" (1850) and "Young Goodman Brown" (1835). "The Maypole of Merrymount" recounts a most interesting encounter between the Puritans and the forces of anarchy and hedonism. Tanglewood Tales (1853) was a re-writing some of the most famous of the ancient Greek myths in a volume for children, for which the Tanglewood estate in Stockbridge and music venue was named.

The Scarlet Letter

With mounting debt and a growing family, Hawthorne moved to Salem. A life-long Democrat, political connections helped him land a job as a surveyor in the Salem Custom House in 1846, providing his family some needed financial security. However, when Whig President Zachary Taylor was elected, Hawthorne lost his appointment due to political favoritism. The dismissal turned into a blessing giving him time to write his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, the story of two lovers who clashed with the Puritan moral law. The book was one of the first mass-produced publications in the United States and its wide distribution made Hawthorne famous

Themes and analysis

The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, is one of the few American world classics. It is generally considered to be Hawthorne's masterpiece. Set in Puritan New England in the seventeenth century, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who gives birth after committing adultery, refusing to name the father. She struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout, Hawthorne explores the issues of grace, legalism, and guilt.

The Scarlet Letter is framed in an introduction (called "The Custom House") in which the writer, a stand-in for Hawthorne, purports to have found documents and papers that substantiate the evidence concerning Prynne and her situation. The narrator also claims that when he touched the letter it gave off a "burning heat… as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red hot iron." There remains no proof of a factual basis for the discovery in "the Custom House."

Plot summary

Hester Prynne, the story's protagonist, is a young married woman whose husband was presumed to have been lost at sea on the journey to the New World. She begins a secret adulterous relationship with Arthur Dimmesdale, the highly regarded town minister, and becomes pregnant with a daughter, whom she names Pearl. She is then publicly vilified and forced to wear the scarlet letter "A" on her clothing to identify her as an adulteress, but loyally refuses to reveal the identity of her lover. She accepts the punishment with grace and refuses to be defeated by the shame inflicted upon her by her society. Hester's virtue becomes increasingly evident to the reader, while the self-described "virtuous" community (especially the power structure) vilify her, and are shown in varying states of moral decay and self-regard. Hester only partially regains her community's favor through good deeds and an admirable character by the end of her life.

Dimmesdale, knowing that the punishment for his sin will be shame or execution, does not admit his relationship with Prynne. In his role as minister he dutifully pillories and interrogates Hester in the town square about her sin and the identity of the father. He maintains his righteous image, but internally he is dogged by his guilt and the shame for his weakness and hypocrisy. The work is tinged with a heavy irony, as among the townspeople he receives admiration while Hester receives social contempt, but for the reader the opposite is true. Finally, Prynne's husband, Roger Chillingworth, reappears without disclosing his identity to anyone but Hester. Suspecting the identity of Hester's partner, he becomes Dimmesdale's caretaker and exacts his revenge by exacerbating his guilt, while keeping him alive physically. Ultimately Dimmesdale—driven to full public disclosure by his ill health—collapses and dies, delivering himself from his earthly tormenter and personal anguish.

Influence

Nathaniel Hawthorne, with contemporaries Melville and Whitman, broke from European fictional conventions to forge a distinctly American literature. Hawthorne understood that America's religious past informed the nation's life and identity. He was absorbed by the enigma of evil and sought to clarify human responsibility within the context of social and moral expectations.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. His family, the Hathornes, had lived in Salem since the seventeenth century. A descendent of the Puritan judges William Hathorne and John Hathorne, a judge who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials, Hawthorne chose to add the “w” to his name when he was in his early twenties. Hawthorne grew up with his mother and uncles in Salem and Raymond, Maine. His father, a ship’s captain, died of yellow fever in 1808. Many of Hawthorne’s childhood poems and stories were concerned with sailing and the sea. Hawthorne suffered temporary paralysis during his youth and studied literature at home with the lexicographer Joseph Emerson Worcester. Hawthorne then attended Bowdoin College from 1821 to 1825, where he wrote his early poems and a novel. He was classmates with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and they developed a friendship later in life. Hawthorne moved back to Salem after graduation.

While best known for his novels, letters, and short stories, Hawthorne also wrote a few poems, notably “The Ocean,” published in the Salem Gazette in 1825, and “Oh Could I Raise the Darken’d Veil,” which appeared in 1820 in the Spectator, a weekly newspaper that Hawthorne created and edited, starting in the summer of that year.

Hawthorne is best known for his four major romances: The Marble Faun (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1860); The Blithedale Romance (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1852); The House of the Seven Gables (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1851); and, most importantly, The Scarlet Letter (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850). He was also a successful short story writer. He gained fame when he published his stories in the collection Twice-Told Tales (American Stationers Co., 1837). During this period, Hawthorne began to attach his own name to his prose. His best-known works are “Ethan Brand” (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850); “The Birth-Mark,” published in James Russell Lowell’s literary periodical, The Pioneer, in 1843; “Young Goodman Brown,” published in The New-England Magazine in 1835; and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” published in the illustrated gift book The Token and Atlantic Souvenir in 1832.

In 1986 Hawthorne was inducted into The American Poets’ Corner, joining the symbolic American pantheon of letters, alongside Robert Frost, the first twentieth-century poet to be inducted. Hawthorne was also recognized and admired by his contemporaries. Herman Melville gave Hawthorne’s short stories rave reviews, in addition to dedicating Moby Dick to him. However, Melville’s view of Hawthorne soured later in life, and Melville presented him unflatteringly in his poem “Clarel.” Longfellow wrote a review of Twice-Told Tales, in which he called Hawthorne a “new star” who wrote with “the heaven of poetry.” Henry James wrote a biographical critical essay on Hawthorne, describing him as “a beautiful, natural, original genius […] no one has had just that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more successfully expressed his vision […] he was not simply a poet. He combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems. Man’s conscience was his theme, but he saw it in the light of a creative fancy which added, out of its own substance, an interest, and, I may almost say, an importance.”

Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, while on a mountain tour with Pierce. Hawthorne is buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord

Poems

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. His family, the Hathornes, had lived in Salem since the seventeenth century. A descendent of the Puritan judges William Hathorne and John Hathorne, a judge who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials, Hawthorne chose to add the “w” to his name when he was in his early twenties. Hawthorne grew up with his mother and uncles in Salem and Raymond, Maine. His father, a ship’s captain, died of yellow fever in 1808. Many of Hawthorne’s childhood poems and stories were concerned with sailing and the sea. Hawthorne suffered temporary paralysis during his youth and studied literature at home with the lexicographer Joseph Emerson Worcester. Hawthorne then attended Bowdoin College from 1821 to 1825, where he wrote his early poems and a novel. He was classmates with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and they developed a friendship later in life. Hawthorne moved back to Salem after graduation.

While best known for his novels, letters, and short stories, Hawthorne also wrote a few poems, notably “The Ocean,” published in the Salem Gazette in 1825, and “Oh Could I Raise the Darken’d Veil,” which appeared in 1820 in the Spectator, a weekly newspaper that Hawthorne created and edited, starting in the summer of that year.

Hawthorne is best known for his four major romances: The Marble Faun (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1860); The Blithedale Romance (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1852); The House of the Seven Gables (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1851); and, most importantly, The Scarlet Letter (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850). He was also a successful short story writer. He gained fame when he published his stories in the collection Twice-Told Tales (American Stationers Co., 1837). During this period, Hawthorne began to attach his own name to his prose. His best-known works are “Ethan Brand” (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850); “The Birth-Mark,” published in James Russell Lowell’s literary periodical, The Pioneer, in 1843; “Young Goodman Brown,” published in The New-England Magazine in 1835; and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” published in the illustrated gift book The Token and Atlantic Souvenir in 1832.

In 1986 Hawthorne was inducted into The American Poets’ Corner, joining the symbolic American pantheon of letters, alongside Robert Frost, the first twentieth-century poet to be inducted. Hawthorne was also recognized and admired by his contemporaries. Herman Melville gave Hawthorne’s short stories rave reviews, in addition to dedicating Moby Dick to him. However, Melville’s view of Hawthorne soured later in life, and Melville presented him unflatteringly in his poem “Clarel.” Longfellow wrote a review of Twice-Told Tales, in which he called Hawthorne a “new star” who wrote with “the heaven of poetry.” Henry James wrote a biographical critical essay on Hawthorne, describing him as “a beautiful, natural, original genius […] no one has had just that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more successfully expressed his vision […] he was not simply a poet. He combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems. Man’s conscience was his theme, but he saw it in the light of a creative fancy which added, out of its own substance, an interest, and, I may almost say, an importance.”

In 1838 Hawthorne became engaged to his future wife, illustrator Sophia Peabody. While his writing often brought him satisfying recognition, it secured him very little income and Hawthorne often struggled to make ends meet, taking various positions throughout his life. As he said in 1820: “I have almost given up writing Poetry […] No Man can be a Poet & a Book-Keeper at the same time.” Hawthorne sought work at the Boston Custom House in 1839, as well as at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm in 1841. By 1842 Hawthorne’s writing provided enough income for him to marry Sophia, and they settled for three years in Concord, Massachusetts. Hawthorne’s neighbors were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the philosopher and educator Bronson Alcott, making the village the leading center of Transcendentalism. While Hawthorne associated with the thinkers and shared many of their philosophies, he preferred the company of Franklin Pierce, his old college friend, who later became the fourteenth U.S. president. Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography on Pierce, titled Life of Franklin Pierce (Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1852). When Pierce became president in 1853, Hawthorne was given the position of U.S. consul in Liverpool. He resigned in 1857 and spent his later years traveling in France and Italy and writing.

Books

In Colonial Days , Septimius Felton , The Blithedale Romance , The House of Seven Gables , The Marble Faun , The Scarlet Letter

Short Stories

An Old Woman's Tale , A Rill from the Town-Pump , Benjamin Franklin ,

Chippings with a Chisel , Circe's Palace , David Swan , Dr. Heidegger's Experiment , Drowne's Wooden Image , Edward Fane's Rosebud , Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent , Endicott and the Red Cross , Ethan Brand , Fancy's Show-Box , Feathertop , Fire Worship , Footprints on the Seashore , Graves and Goblins , How Theseus Slays the Minotaur , John Inglefield's Thanksgiving , Legends of the Province House: I. Howe's Masquerade , Legends of the Province House: II. Edward Randolph's Portrait , Legends of the Province House: III. Lady Eleanore's Mantle , Legends of the Province House: IV. Old Esther Dudley , Little Annie's Ramble , Monsieur du Miroir

Mosses from an Old Manse , Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe , Mrs. Bullfrog

My Kinsman, Major Molineux , Night-Sketches , Oliver Cromwell , Passages from a Relinquished Work , Pegasus, The Winged Horse , Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure , Rappaccini's Daughter , Roger Malvin's Burial , Sights from a Steeple , Sir Isaac Newton , Sketches from Memory , Snowflakes , Sunday At Home , The Ambitious Guest , The Antique Ring , The Artist of the Beautiful ,

The Birthmark , The Boston Massacre , The Canterbury Pilgrims , The Celestial Railroad , The Chimaera , The Christmas Banquet , The Devil in Manuscript , The Dragon's Teeth , The Gentle Boy , The Ghost of Dr. Harris ,

The Golden Fleece , The Golden Touch , The Gorgon's Head , The Gray Champion , The Great Carbuncle , The Great Stone Face , The Hall of Fantasy , The Haunted Mind , The Hollow of the Three Hills , The Intelligence Office , The Lilly's Quest , The Maypole of Merry Mount , The Minister's Black Veil , The Minotaur , The New Adam and Eve , The Old Apple-Dealer ,

The Paradise of Children , The Pomegranate Seeds , The Procession of Life ,

The Prophetic Pictures , The Pygmies , The Seven Vagabonds , The Shaker Bridal , The Sister-Years , The Snow Image: A Childish Miracle , The Threefold Destiny , The Three Golden Apples , The Toll-Gatherer's Day ,

The Village Uncle , The Vision of the Fountain , The Wayside. Introductory. ,

The Wedding Knell , The White Old Maid , The Wives of the Dead , Wakefield , Young Goodman Brown

Poems

Address to the Moon , Earthly Pomp , Go to the Grave , Oh Could I Raise the Darken'd Veil

Essays

Buds and Bird-Voices

My Visit to Niagara

8- ] American Literature

8- ] American Literature

 

From The Best American Writers

Notable authors of American literature include: John Smith, who wrote some of its earliest works; Phillis Wheatley, who wrote the first African American book; Edgar Allan Poe, a standout of the Romantic era; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a celebrated poet; Emily Dickinson, a woman who wrote poetry at a time when the field was largely dominated by men; Mark Twain, a master of humour and realism; Ernest Hemingway, a novelist who articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation; and Toni Morrison, a writer who centred her works on the black experience and received a Nobel Prize in 1993.

There is a great and proud tradition of American writers, including some of the world’s most famous authors. Novels, plays, and poems pour out of the United States, with increasing numbers of women, African American, Native American and Hispanic writers making a strong contribution. There have been twelve literature Nobel Prize laureates, beginning with Sinclair Lewis in 1930 to Bob Dylan, in 2016. Other American writers who were laureates include such household names as T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. American writers’ contribution to
English literature is incalculable

The American literary tradition began when some of the early English colonists recounted their adventures in the New World for the benefit of readers in their mother country (see our list of the best English authors). Some of those early writings were quite accomplished, such as the account of his adventures by Captain John Smith in Virginia and the journalistic histories of John Winthrop and William Bradford in New England.

It was in the Puritan colonies that published American literature was born, with writers like Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams producing works to promote their visions of the religious state. Perhaps the first book to be published by in America was the Bay Psalm Book in 1640, produced by thirty ministers, led by Richard Mather and John Cotton. It was followed by passionate histories like Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence (1654) and Cotton and Mather’s epic Magnalia Christi Americana (1702).

The American Revolution and the subsequent independence of the United States was a time of intellectual activity together with social and economic change. The founding fathers of the new state included the writers, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Philip Freneau, the first American lyric poet of distinction, the pamphleteer Thomas Paine, later an attacker of conventional religion, and the polemicist Francis Hopkinson, who was also the first American composer. The 19th-century saw the spreading and recognition of American writing in Europe with the folk stories of Washington Irving, the frontier adventures of Fenimore Cooper and the moralising verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Then came the giants, who took even the old world by storm and are still regarded as being among the greats of Western literature: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and the poet, Walt Whitman.

That romantic trend was interrupted by two of America’s great writers, Henry James, and Mark Twain, who threw the doors open to a new realism and changed American literature, setting it up for the rich literature that followed and which has not diminished. James emigrated to Europe and embraced psychological realism in novels such as Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Twain used national dialects in classics like Huckleberry Finn (1885).

The twentieth century witnessed the flowering of American literature. Confronted by the violence of the 20th century, a sense of despair was reflected in the literature, and the particular conditions of American society with all its diversity found its way into American writing.   In the 1950s, major dramatists, notably Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard,  developed the American theatre. African-American writers, such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, dealt with racial inequality and violence in contemporary US society while Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison focused on the 20th-century history of African-American women. In the 1960s, novelists such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Joseph Heller examined the Jewish experience in American society.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. It was a controversial decision. However, it points to a new development in the progress of American literature when a songwriter’s work is regarded as literature. There have been several great American songwriters in the past century and one can find many of the concerns of modern America in the national songbook but this is the first time that American songs have been regarded as “literature.” Over seven decades Dylan has addressed the changes that America has experienced, ranging over war, race, climate change, and many other phenomena, producing a comprehensive commentary on the times in which we live. Some of the lyrics of his songs are regarded as being among the finest poetry of the period.

7- ] American Literature

7- American Literature 

List of American Writers .

This list of American writers is alphabetically ordered by period. The term writers is broadly defined to include philosophers, scientists, cookbook writers, critics, journalists, sociologists, historians, and even explorers, as well as poets and novelists. This list is limited, however, to those writers springing from the European tradition, including the work of African American writers who were schooled in the United States and others who were not by definition U.S. citizens but who wrote works of importance to American culture or American literature. It should also be noted that writers who overlap two periods are usually listed within the period that they wrote their most representative works.

Colonial era

William Bradford , Anne Bradstreet , Thomas Harriot , Increase Mather , Cotton Mather , Thomas Morton , Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca , William Penn , Samuel Sewall , John Smith , Edward Taylor , Nathaniel Ward , Michael Wigglesworth , Roger Williams , John Winthrop

The 18th century

Abigail Adams , Hannah Adams , John Adams , Conrad Beissel , Charles Brockden Brown , William Hill Brown , William Byrd , Jonathan Carver

, Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur , Joseph Dennie , John Dickinson , Joseph Rodman Drake , Timothy Dwight , Jonathan Edwards ,

Olaudah Equiano , Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson , Hannah Webster Foster ,

Benjamin Franklin , Philip Freneau , Samuel Griswold Goodrich , Alexander Hamilton , Samuel Hopkins , Thomas Jefferson , Sarah Kemble Knight , Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton , Judith Sargent Stevens Murray , Thomas Paine , Edward Taylor , Lucy Terry , John Trumbull , Royall Tyler ,

Mercy Otis Warren , Phillis Wheatley , John Woolman

The early 19th century to the end of the American Civil War

Jacob Abbott , Bronson Alcott , Delia Salter Bacon , Robert Montgomery Bird ,  Black Hawk , Maria Gowen Brooks , John Brougham , William Wells Brown , William Cullen Bryant , Anna Ella Carroll , Alice Cary , Phoebe Cary , William Ellery Channing , Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut , Lydia Maria Child , Ada Clare , James Fenimore Cooper , Maria Susanna Cummins , George William Curtis , Richard Henry Dana , Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis , Martin R. Delany , David Dickson , Frederick Douglass ,Mary Henderson Eastman , Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet , Ralph Waldo Emerson , Margaret Fuller , William Lloyd Garrison , Caroline Howard Gilman , Angelina Emily Grimké , James Hall , Fitz-Greene Halleck , Frances E.W. Harper , George Washington Harris , Nathaniel Hawthorne , George Moses Horton ,  Washington Irving , Harriet A. Jacobs , John P. Kennedy , Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie , Abraham Lincoln , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , Herman Melville , Adah Isaacs Menken , Harriet Mann Miller , Donald Grant Mitchell ,  Clement Clarke Moore , Anna Cora Mowatt , Mary Gove Nichols , Solomon Northup , Fitz-James O’Brien , Francis Parkman , Sara Payson Willis Parton , James Kirke Paulding , John Howard Payne , Mary Hayden Green Pike , Edgar Allan Poe , Catharine Maria Sedgwick , L.H. Sigourney , William Gilmore Simms , Seba Smith , Ann Sophia Stephens , Harriet Beecher Stowe ,

Henry David Thoreau , Henry Timrod , Sojourner Truth , Jones Very , David Walker , Mason Locke Weems , Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher , Sarah Helen Power Whitman , Walt Whitman , John Greenleaf Whittier , David Wilson , Harriet E. Wilson ,

The end of the Civil War to World War I

Charles Follen Adams , Henry Adams , William Taylor Adams , Louisa May Alcott , Isabella Macdonald Alden , Thomas Bailey Aldrich , Francesca Alexander , Horatio Alger , Elizabeth Anne Chase Akers Allen , Mary Austin ,

Joel Barlow , Katharine Lee Bates , L. Frank Baum , Clifford Whittingham Beers , Ethel Lynn Beers , David Belasco , Edward Bellamy , Ambrose Bierce ,

Lillie Devereux Blake , Dion Boucicault , Randolph Silliman Bourne , Hugh Henry Brackenridge , Gamaliel Bradford , Alice Brown , Orestes Augustus Brownson , Henry Cuyler Bunner , Frances Hodgson Burnett , John Burroughs , George W. Cable , Abraham Cahan , Charles W. Chesnutt

Kate Chopin , Winston Churchill , James Freeman Clarke , Rebecca Sophia Clarke , Florence Van Leer Earle Nicholson Coates , Frank Moore Colby ,

Moncure Daniel Conway , Rose Terry Cooke , Ina Donna Coolbrith , Anna Julia Cooper , Stephen Crane , Adelaide Crapsey , F. Marion Crawford , Fanny Crosby , Augustin Daly , Flora Adams Darling , Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis , Richard Harding Davis , John William DeForest , Emily Dickinson , Mary Abigail Dodge , Mary Mapes Dodge , Ignatius Donnelly ,

Julia Caroline Ripley Dorr , Theodore Dreiser , W.E.B. Du Bois , Paul Laurence Dunbar , Edward Eggleston , Ernest F. Fenollosa , Eugene Field ,

James T. Fields , Martha Finley , Harrison Grey Fiske , Clyde Fitch , Mary Anna Hallock Foote , Harold Frederic , Mary E. Wilkins Freeman , Jessie Ann Benton Frémont , Helen Hamilton Gardener , Hamlin Garland , Jeannette Leonard Gilder , William Hooker Gillette , Charlotte Perkins Gilman , Avrom Goldfaden , Anna Katharine Green , Charlotte Forten Grimké , Louise Imogen Guiney , Edward Everett Hale , Lucretia Peabody Hale , Sarah Josepha Hale , Frances E.W. Harper , Ida A. Husted Harper , Edward Harrigan , Joel Chandler Harris , Bret Harte , John Hay , Paul Hamilton Hayne , Lafcadio Hearn , O. Henry , James A. Herne , Marietta Holley , Oliver Wendell Holmes , Pauline Hopkins , Richard Hovey , Bronson Howard , Julia Ward Howe , William Dean llowells , Elbert Hubbard , Helen Hunt Jackson , Henry James , Sarah Orne Jewett , James Weldon Johnson ,

E.Z.C. Judson , John La Farge , Sidney Lanier , Emma Lazarus , Homer Lea ,

Charles Godfrey Leland , Jack London , James Russell Lowell , Steele MacKaye , Helen Marot , Brander Matthews , George Barr McCutcheon ,

Joaquin Miller , S. Weir Mitchell , William Vaughn Moody , Julia A. Moore ,

Margaret Warner Morley , Ellen Louise Chandler Moulton , Mary Noailles Murfree , Eliza Jane Poitevent Holbrook Nicholson , Frank Norris , Thomas Nelson Page , Joseph Pennell , Nora Perry , Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt , Maria Louise Pool , Elizabeth Payson Prentiss , Howard Pyle , Opie Read ,

James Whitcomb Riley , Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson , O.E. Rölvaag ,

Susanna Rowson , Edgar Evertson Saltus , Benjamin Sanborn , Margaret Elizabeth Munson Sangster , William Gilmore Simms , Hannah Whitall Smith , Emma Southworth , Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford , Edmund Clarence Stedman , Frank Richard Stockton , Richard Henry Stoddard , Ida M. Tarbell , Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune , Celia Laighton Thaxter , Augustus Thomas , Rose Alnora Hartwick Thorpe , Thomas B. Thorpe , Mabel Loomis Todd , Kate Nichols Trask , Frederick Jackson Turner , Mark Twain , Mariana Alley Griswold Van Rensselaer , Frances Auretta Fuller Victor ,

Metta Victoria Fuller Victor , Lewis Wallace , Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

 , Susan Bogert Warner and Anna Bartlett Warner , Booker T. Washington ,

Jean Webster , Ida B. Wells-Barnett ,Edward Noyes Westcott , Edith Wharton , Walt Whitman , Adeline Dutton Train Whitney , Ella Wheeler Wilcox , Augusta Jane Evans Wilson , Owen Wister , Sarah Chauncey Woolsey , Constance Fenimore Woolson , Zitkala-Sa

From World War I to the end of World War II

Louis Adamic , Charles Follen Adams , Franklin Pierce Adams , Hannah Adams , Léonie Adams , Samuel Hopkins Adams , George Ade , Conrad Aiken , Maxwell Anderson , Regina M. Anderson , Sherwood Anderson ,

Katharine Anthony , Gertrude Atherton , Joseph Auslander , Irving Babbitt ,

Irving Bacheller , Ray Stannard Baker , Faith Baldwin , Djuna Barnes , Philip Barry , Vicki Baum , Sylvia Beach , S.N. Behrman , Robert Benchley , Stephen Vincent Benét , Gwendolyn Bennett , Aline Frankau Bernstein , Albert J. Beveridge , Earl Derr Biggers , John Peale Bishop , Marc Blitzstein ,

Maxwell Bodenheim , Arna Bontemps , Louis Bromfield , Cleanth Brooks , Van Wyck Brooks , Margaret Wise Brown , Gelett Burgess , Thornton W. Burgess , Kenneth Burke , Edgar Rice Burroughs , Virginia Lee Burton ,

James Branch Cabell , W.J. Cash , Willa Cather , Raymond Chandler ,

John Jay Chapman , Leslie Charteris , Mary Ellen Chase , Irvin S. Cobb ,

Robert P. Tristram Coffin , George M. Cohan , Marc Connelly , Jack Conroy , Jane Cowl , Malcolm Cowley , George Cram , Hart Crane , Frank Craven ,

Harry Crosby , Rachel Crothers , Countee Cullen , E.E. Cummings , Ève Curie , Donald Davidson , H.L. Davis , Margaret Deland , Floyd Dell , Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) , John Dos Passos , Ruth Draper , Theodore Dreiser , Alice Dunbar Nelson , Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm , T.S. Eliot , John Erskine ,

James T. Farrell , William Faulkner , Jessie Redmon Fauset , Kenneth Fearing , Edna Ferber , Dorothy Canfield Fisher , Rudolph Fisher , Dudley Fitts , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Douglas Southall Freeman , Robert Frost , Henry Blake Fuller , Wanda Hazel Gág , Zona Gale , Erle Stanley Gardner , Howard R. Garis , Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould , Ira Gershwin , Khalil Gibran , Ellen Glasgow , Susan Glaspell , Zane Grey , Angelina Weld Grimké , Edgar A. Guest , Louise Closser Hale , Moyshe Leyb Halpern , Moss Hart ,

Lillian Hellman , Ernest Hemingway , Joseph Hergesheimer , DuBose Heyward , Granville Hicks, Ralph Hodgson , Sidney Howard , E.W. Howe , Langston Hughes , Zora Neale Hurston , Robinson Jeffers , James Weldon Johnson , Osa Johnson , George S. Kaufman ,George Kelly , Joyce Kilmer ,

George Lyman Kittredge , Oliver La Farge , Ring Lardner , Nella Larsen ,

Meridel Le Sueur , Sinclair Lewis , Vachel Lindsay , Hugh Lofting , H.P. Lovecraft , Amy Lowell , John Livingston Lowes , Mina Loy , Clare Boothe Luce , Charles MacArthur , Percy MacKaye , Archibald MacLeish , Frances Marion , Edwin Markham , Edgar Lee Masters , F.O. Matthiessen , Robert McAlmon , Claude McKay , H.L. Mencken , Edna St. Vincent Millay , Alice Duer Miller , Margaret Mitchell , Harriet Monroe , Marianne Moore , Paul Elmer More , John Gneisenau Neihardt , Richard Nugent , Rose Cecil O’Neill , Clifford Odets , Tillie Olsen , Dorothy Parker , Vernon L. Parrington ,  Josephine Preston Peabody , Lucy Fitch Perkins , Maxwell Perkins , Ralph Barton Perry , David Pinski , Eleanor Hodgman Porter , Gene Stratton Porter , Katherine Anne Porter , Ezra Pound , Ellery Queen , Philip Rahv , John Crowe Ransom , Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings , Lizette Woodworth Reese ,

Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice , Elmer Rice , Laura Riding , Ameen Rihani ,

Mary Roberts Rinehart , Elizabeth Madox Roberts , Kenneth Roberts ,

Edwin Arlington Robinson , Henry Roth , Damon Runyon , Carl Sandburg , Anne Douglas Sedgwick , Ernest Thompson Seton , Charles Monroe Sheldon ,

Robert E. Sherwood , Constance Lindsay Skinner , Gertrude Stein , Wallace Stevens , Michael Strange , Edward Stratemeyer , Genevieve Taggard , Booth Tarkington , Allen Tate , Sara Teasdale , Albert Payson Terhune , Dorothy Thompson , Wallace Henry Thurman , Eunice Tietjens , Jean Toomer , Ridgely Torrence , Lionel Trilling , S.S. Van Dine , Carl Van Doren , Mark Van Doren , Henry Van Dyke , Carl Van Vechten , Carolyn Wells , Nathanael West , Edith Wharton , Laura Ingalls Wilder , Thornton Wilder , William Carlos Williams , Edmund Wilson ,  Yvor Winters ,  Thomas Wolfe , Richard Wright , Elinor Wylie , Post-World War II , Edward Abbey , George Abbott ,

Walter Abish , M.H. Abrams , Jill Abramson , Diane Ackerman, Goodman Ace , Kathy Acker , Renata Adler , James Agee , Conrad Aiken , Edward Albee , Sherman Alexie , Nelson Algren , Paula Gunn Allen , Woody Allen ,

Svetlana Alliluyeva , Joseph Alsop , A.R. Ammons , Rudolfo A. Anaya ,

Poul Anderson , Roger Angell , Maya Angelou , Kenneth Anger , David Antin , Kwame Anthony Appiah , Max Apple , Harriette Arnow , Sholem Asch , John Ashbery , Isaac Asimov , Brooke Russell Astor , Louis Auchincloss , W.H. Auden , Jean Auel , Paul Auster , Pearl Bailey , Augusta Braxton Baker , Carlos Baker , Russell Baker , James Baldwin , Toni Cade Bambara , Russell Banks , Amiri Baraka , Red Barber , John Barth , Donald Barthelme ,  Frederick Barthelme , W. Jackson Bate , Ann Beattie , Alison Bechdel , Saul Bellow , Nina Berberova , Gertrude Berg , Thomas Berger , Daniel Berrigan,

Wendell Berry , John Berryman , Alfred Bester , Frank Bidart , Elizabeth Bishop , Richard Bissell , James Blish , Allan Bloom , Harold Bloom , Judy Blume , Robert Bly , Louise Bogan , Wayne C. Booth , Anthony Boucher ,

Catherine Bowen , Jane Bowles , Paul Bowles , Kay Boyle , Ray Bradbury ,

Roark Bradford , Ben Bradlee , Marion Zimmer Bradley , Richard Brautigan , Jimmy Breslin , John Malcolm Brinnin , Harold Brodkey , Joseph Brodsky ,

Gwendolyn Brooks , Richard Brooks , Van Wyck Brooks , Claude Brown , Dan Brown , Helen Gurley Brown , Sterling Brown , Tina Brown , Pearl S. Buck , Charles Bukowski , Ed Bullins , William S. Burroughs , Frederick Busch , Octavia E. Butler , James M. Cain , Erskine Caldwell , Taylor Caldwell , Hortense Calisher , Bebe Moore Campbell , John W. Campbell ,

Truman Capote , Robert Caro , John Dickson Carr , Hayden Carruth , Raymond Carver , Ana Castillo , Michael Chabon , Joseph Chaikin , Raymond Chandler , Paddy Chayefsky , John Cheever , Alice Childress ,

John Ciardi , Sandra Cisneros , Amy Clampitt , Tom Clancy ,

Walter van Tilburg Clark , Beverly Cleary , Hal Clement , Eldridge Cleaver ,

Lucille Clifton , Billy Collins , Jackie Collins , Suzanne Collins ,Padraic Colum , Betty Comden , Evan S. Connell , Marc Connelly , Robert Coover ,

Alfred Corn , Patricia Cornwell , Gregory Corso , Jayne Cortez , Bill Cosby ,

Thomas B. Costain , Norman Cousins , Malcolm Cowley , James Gould Cozzens , Robert Creeley , Frederick C. Crews , Michael Crichton , Stanley Crouch , Mary Crow Dog , R. Crumb , James Crumley , J.V. Cunningham ,

Christopher Paul Curtis , Edwidge Danticat , Henry Darger , Donald Davidson , Angela Davis , Lydia Davis , Ossie Davis , Paul de Man , Agnes de Mille , Peter De Vries , Samuel R. Delany , Don DeLillo , Maya Deren , Kiran Desai , Babette Deutsch , Diane di Prima , Abby Morton Diaz , Kate DiCamillo , Philip K. Dick , James Dickey , Joan Didion , Annie Dillard ,

Thomas Dixon , Stephen Dobyns , E.L. Doctorow , Owen Dodson , Sam Donaldson , J.P. Donleavy , Rita Dove , Andre Dubus , Alan Dugan , Henry Dumas , Robert Duncan , John Gregory Dunne , Ariel and Will Durant ,

Richard Eberhart , Leon Edel , Jennifer Egan , Dave Eggers , Will Eisner ,

Lonne Elder III , Stanley Elkin , Harlan Ellison , Ralph Ellison , Richard Ellmann , James Ellroy , Nora Ephron , Louise Erdrich , Janet Evanovich ,

Mari Evans , William Everson , Clifton Fadiman , John Fante , Lawrence Ferlinghetti , Leslie Fiedler , Harvey Fierstein , Shulamith Firestone , M.F.K. Fisher , Robert Fitzgerald , Janet Flanner , Gillian Flynn , Horton Foote ,

Shelby Foote , Carolyn Forché , Richard Ford , Maria Irene Fornés , Leon Forrest , James Franco , Jonathan Franzen , Michael Fried , Bruce Jay Friedman , Charles Fuller , William Gaddis , Ernest J. Gaines , Tess Gallagher , John Gardner ,William H. Gass , Henry Louis Gates, Jr. , James Maurice Gavin , Theodor Seuss Geisel , Jack Gelber , Elizabeth George ,

Zulfikar Ghose , William Gibson , Brendan Gill , Allen Ginsberg , Nikki Giovanni , Malcolm Gladwell , Jacob Glatstein , Louise Glück ,Gail Godwin ,

Horace Gold , Albert Goldbarth , Amy Goodman , William Goldman , Mary Gordon , Ruth Gordon , Edward Gorey ,Chaim Grade , Sue Grafton , Jorie Graham , Shirley Ann Grau , Julien Green , Paul Green , Stephen Greenblatt , Horace Gregory , John Grisham , John Guare , Thom Gunn , A.B. Guthrie, Jr. , Rosa Guy , David Halberstam , Alex Haley , Donald Hall , Edith Hamilton , Dashiell Hammett , Daniel Handler , Barry Hannah , Lorraine Hansberry , Joseph Hansen ,Elizabeth Hardwick , Joy Harjo , Michael S. Harper , Michael Harrington , E. Lynn Harris , Jim Harrison , Geoffrey H. Hartman , Robert Hass , Ethan Hawke , John Hawkes , Robert Hayden ,

Shirley Hazzard , Anthony Hecht , Ben Hecht , Carolyn Heilbrun , Robert A. Heinlein , Joseph Heller , Lillian Hellman , Aleksandar Hemon , Beth Henley ,

Frank Herbert , John Hersey , Patricia Highsmith , Oscar Hijuelos , Chester Himes , Christopher Hitchens , Edward Hoagland , Russell Hoban , Laura Z. Hobson , Abbie Hoffman , Alice Hoffman , Daniel Hoffman , A.M. Homes , Bell Hooks , Paul Horgan , Khaled Hosseini , Richard Howard , Irving Howe ,

L. Ron Hubbard , Arianna Huffington , Josephine Humphreys , Evan Hunter , Fannie Hurst , David Henry Hwang , David Ignatow , William Inge , John Irving , Christopher Isherwood , Shirley Jackson , Randall Jarrell , Ricky Jay , Ha Jin , Diane Johnson , Edward P. Jones , James Jones , June Jordan

Matthew Josephson , Donald Justice ,Gil Kane , Garson Kanin , Rosabeth Moss Kanter , MacKinlay Kantor , Justin Kaplan , Bob Kaufman , Alfred Kazin , Garrison Keillor , William Kennedy , Jack Kerouac , Jean Kerr

Ken Kesey , Jamaica Kincaid , Stephen King , Barbara Kingsolver , Maxine Hong Kingston , Galway Kinnell , James Kirkwood , Carolyn Kizer , Etheridge Knight , John Knowles , Kenneth Koch , Annette Kolodny ,

Yusef Komunyakaa ,  Ted Kooser , Arthur Kopit , C.M. Kornbluth , Jerzy Kosinski , Richard Kostelanetz , Larry Kramer , Irving Kristol , Joseph Wood Krutch , Joe Kubert , Maxine Kumin , Stanley Kunitz , Tony Kushner ,

Emeril Lagasse , Jhumpa Lahiri , Louis L’Amour , Kristin Hunter Lattany ,

Richmond Lattimore , James Laughlin , John Howard Lawson , Eva Le Gallienne , Ursula K. Le Guin , Meridel Le Sueur , Jim Lehrer , Fritz Leiber ,

Madeleine L’Engle , Elmore Leonard , Alan Jay Lerner , Tracy Letts , Denise Levertov , Meyer Levin , Philip Levine , Walter Lippmann , John Lithgow ,

Joshua Logan , Alan Lomax , Haniel Long , Anita Loos , Barry Lopez , Audre Lorde , Robert Lowell , Robert Ludlum , Alison Lurie , Cynthia Macdonald ,

Dwight Macdonald , John D. MacDonald , Ross Macdonald , Helen Clark MacInnes , Archibald MacLeish , Haki R. Madhubuti , Gregory Maguire ,

Norman Mailer , Bernard Malamud , Dumas Malone , David Mamet , Herman Mankiewicz , Thomas Mann , Marya Mannes , J.P. Marquand ,

Paule Marshall , George R.R. Martin , Bobbie Ann Mason , Peter Matthiessen , Armistead Maupin , Elsa Maxwell , William Maxwell , Anne McCaffrey ,

Cormac McCarthy , Mary McCarthy , Frank McCourt , Carson McCullers ,

David McCullough , Joseph McElroy , Phyllis McGinley , Thomas McGuane ,

Danica McKellar , Terry McMillan , Larry McMurtry , Terrence McNally ,

William H. McNeill , John McPhee , James Alan McPherson , William Meredith , Ethel Merman , James Merrill ,  Thomas Merton , W.S. Merwin ,

Stephenie Meyer , Leonard Michaels , James Michener , Bette Midler , Arthur Miller , Frank Miller , Henry Miller , J. Hillis Miller , May Miller

, Kate Millett , Czesław Miłosz , Jessica Mitford , N. Scott Momaday , Paul Monette , Colleen Moore , Marianne Moore , Michael Moore , Samuel Eliot Morison , Christopher Morley , Wright Morris , Toni Morrison , Walter Mosley , Howard Moss , Lisel Mueller , Bharati Mukherjee , Albert Murray

 , Vladimir Nabokov , Ogden Nash , Gloria Naylor , Howard Nemerov , Allan Nevins , Beaumont Newhall , Nancy Newhall , Anaïs Nin , Andre Norton ,

Joyce Carol Oates , Tim O’Brien, Flannery O’Connor , Frank O’Hara , John Henry O’Hara , Eugene O’Neill , Sharon Olds , Mary Oliver , Tillie Olsen ,

Charles Olson , Elder Olson , George Oppen , Cynthia Ozick , Camille Paglia ,

Grace Paley , Sara Paretsky , Gordon Parks , Suzan-Lori Parks , Kenneth Patchen , Ann Patchett , James Patterson , Harvey Pekar , William Pène du Bois , Walker Percy , S.J. Perelman , Tyler Perry , Joseph E. Persico , Roger Tory Peterson , Harry Mark Petrakis , Ann Petry , Steven Pinker , Robert Pinsky , Sylvia Plath , Frederik Pohl , Marie Ponsot , Charles Portis , Chaim Potok , Gabriel Preil , Reynolds Price , Harold Prince , Frederic Prokosch ,

E. Annie Proulx , James Purdy , Samuel Whitehall Putnam , Thomas Pynchon , Anna Quindlen , Gregory Rabassa , David Rabe , Ayn Rand , John Crowe Ransom , John Rechy , Ishmael Reed, Kathy Reichs , Kenneth Rexroth ,

Charles Reznikoff , Anne Rice , Adrienne Rich , Conrad Michael Richter ,

Faith Ringgold , Harold Robbins , Tom Robbins , Nora Roberts , Carolyn M. Rodgers , Theodore Roethke , Henry Rollins , Holmes Rolston III , Mickey Rooney , Leo Rosten , Henry Roth , Philip Roth , Muriel Rukeyser , Joanna Russ , Kay Ryan , William Safire , Carl Sagan , Edward Said , Adela Rogers St. Johns , J.D. Salinger , James Salter , Sonia Sanchez , Mari Sandoz

Sapphire , Winthrop Sargeant , William Saroyan , May Sarton , John Sayles ,

Dore Schary , Budd Schulberg , James Schuyler , Delmore Schwartz , Jon Scieszka , David Sedaris , Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , Hubert Selby, Jr. , Anne Sexton , Delmore Schwartz , Maurice Sendak , Ramón José Sender , Anya Seton , Anne Sexton , Ntozake Shange , Karl Shapiro , Irwin Shaw , Wallace Shawn , Wilfrid Sheed , Elaine Showalter , Leslie Marmon Silko , Shel Silverstein , Charles Simic , David Simon , Kate Simon , Louis Simpson ,

I.J. Singer , Isaac Bashevis Singer , B.F. Skinner , Cornelia Otis Skinner ,

Jane Smiley , Tavis Smiley , Anna Deavere Smith , E.E. Smith , Kate Smith ,

Lee Smith , William Jay Smith , Robert Smithson , W.D. Snodgrass , Gary Snyder , Susan Sontag , Aaron Sorkin , Gilbert Sorrentino , Terry Southern ,

Nicholas Sparks , Art Spiegelman , Mickey Spillane , Jean Stafford , William Stafford , Danielle Steel , Wallace Stegner , John Steinbeck , Bruce Sterling ,

Richard G. Stern , R.L. Stine , Irving Stone , Robert Stone , Rex Stout , Mark Strand , Anna Louise Strong , Theodore Sturgeon , William Styron , May Swenson , Amy Tan , James Tate , Peter Taylor , Studs Terkel , Paul Theroux , Lewis Thomas , Hunter S. Thompson , Jim Thompson , Kay Thompson ,

James Thurber , James Tiptree, Jr. , Michael Todd , Melvin Tolson , Natasha Trethewey , Dalton Trumbo , Scott Turow , Anne Tyler , Louis Untermeyer ,

John Updike , Leon Uris , Mona Van Duyn , Melvin Van Peebles , Amy Vanderbilt , Gloria Vanderbilt , Gore Vidal , Bert Vogelstein , Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. , Diane Wakoski , Alice Walker , Margaret Walker , David Foster Wallace , Chris Ware , Robert Penn Warren , Wendy Wasserstein ,

Orson Welles , Eudora Welty , Cornel West , Dorothy West , Jessamyn West ,

William Wharton , E.B. White , Edmund White , Theodore H. White , Phyllis Ayame Whitney , Reed Whittemore , John Edgar Wideman , Elie Wiesel ,

Richard Wilbur , George Will , August Wilson , Edmund Wilson , Lanford Wilson , C.K. Williams , Tennessee Williams , Al Williamson , Yvor Winters,

Larry Woiwode , Tom Wolfe , Tobias Wolff , Douglas Woolf , Herman Wouk ,

Charles Wright , James Wright , Frank Yerby , Marguerite Young , Marguerite Yourcenar , Zhang Ailing , Paul Zindel , Louis Zukofsky