The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Volume B: American Literature, 1880-1865

Overview

In the early years of the new Republic, educated Americans were generally more familiar with Greek and Roman history, European history, Greco-Roman classics, and British literature than they were with the work of colonial and Revolutionary writers. Many works of American literature were simply not accessible. By contrast, books, magazines, and literary quarterlies from England were frequently republished or reprinted in the United States. Inexpensive postage for printed material further facilitated the use of the British literary canon from Maine to Georgia. In terms of literary knowledge, gender differences were often a greater determinant than regional differences. Women were denied a classical education to protect them from the sexually frank writings in Greek and Latin, as well as from the “evil” effects of novels. Many well-educated Americans advocated the need for a national poem; critics encouraged aspiring writers to take up subjects such as the American Revolution, Native American legends, and stories of colonial battles in order to celebrate the new country. Nonetheless, the popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels altered early calls for a national literature. Personal travel books were adaptable to different regional experiences of emerging American writers.

Although Christian Schussele’s reverential painting Washington Irving and His Literary Friends at Sunnyside depicted a fictional encounter of many writers who had never met, it provides an indication of the shifts to the canon of American writers since 1863. Most notably, the painting includes no women writers of the period, such as Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe; nor does it include several male writers who are currently considered the most important of the century, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. Despite the fictional encounter in Schussele’s painting, many writers of the period knew each other, often intimately, or knew about each other. Many male writers came together casually for drinking and dining in public houses, or formed clubs, such as the Bread and Cheese Club and the Saturday Club.

Although the United States expanded with the acquisitions of Louisiana from France and the Southwest from Mexico, most of the writers still read today lived their entire lives in the original thirteen states. Improvements in transportation and the expansion of urban areas changed the mental topography of the country. By the 1850s, travel between major cities, with the exception of San Francisco, which became an instant metropolis in the Gold Rush of 1849, ceased to be hazardous. As the country expanded, writers began to look beyond the eastern seaboard for inspiration and subject matter, yet they still looked mostly to the east for their audiences.

While publishing centers developed along the eastern coastal cities of New York, Philadelphia, and later Boston, the creation of a national book-buying market for American literature was long delayed. To earn a living, many literary writers contributed columns and articles to newspapers or edited magazines. Though writers often created characters who lived up to the myth of Yankee individualism, other writers dismissed Americans as intolerant conformists. Differences in social status, such as gender and class, were not uniformly addressed by all writers. Almost all major writers found themselves at odds with Protestant Christianity, which exerted practical control over what could be printed in books and magazines. In the late 1830s and 1840s, Transcendentalism was treated as a national laughingstock or a menace to organized religion in most mainstream newspapers and magazines.

Although conservative Protestants were threatened by Transcendentalism and other resistances to Christian doctrine, they were more threatened by Catholic, Jewish, Asian, and Caribbean immigrants. Refugees from the Napoleonic Wars, famine-struck Ireland, and Jews fleeing the pogroms in Russia met with anti-immigration propaganda and violence. The lives of thousands of immigrant laborers from China, the Caribbean, Ireland, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries were lost so that railroads could be built quickly and cheaply. In addition to general xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence at the hands of private citizens of the United States, the government itself was responsible for “national sins” including the near-genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, and the staged “Executive War” against Mexico, among others. While many white writers actively opposed slavery, one of the most powerful antislavery advocates was Frederick Douglass, who spoke and wrote of his own enslavement.

Americans struggled to make sense of the profound political and social changes in Europe after the French Revolution, which had been inspired partly by the American Revolution. Americans also struggled with advances in scientific knowledge. Even before Charles Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859, biologists were publishing evidence of plant and animal evolution. Geologists presented evidence that challenged chronologies of the universe established by religion. As scientists ventured off to distant parts of the world to study and conduct research, European countries and the United States embarked on a ferocious quest for overseas colonies.