American Literature: Prose

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Transcendentalism

In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts, and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18th-century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson’s essay Nature (1836) was the first major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. His other key transcendentalist works include The American Scholar (1837), a volume in which he addressed the intellectual’s duty to culture, and 'Self-Reliance' (1841), an essay in which he asserted the importance of being true to one’s own nature.

Henry David Thoreau, a friend and protégé of Emerson’s, put transcendentalist ideas into action. Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) is his journal of a two-year experiment in living as simply and self-reliantly as possible in a small hut that he built on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord. His essay 'Civil Disobedience' (1849) is a statement against government coercion that records his short stay in jail after he refused to pay a tax in support of the Mexican War (1846-1848). In this essay Thoreau asserted that each individual indirectly supported the wrongs of a nation—for example, slavery or war—simply by paying taxes and voting for government representatives. To express disapproval of government policies, he advocated passive resistance, or nonviolent protest through noncompliance.

Other influential transcendentalists included educator and philosopher Bronson Alcott, whose interests centered on education reform, and social reformer Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) was a major early work of American feminism. Along with Emerson and critic and reformer George Ripley, Fuller founded The Dial in 1840. This periodical was dedicated to publishing the verse and philosophical writings of the transcendentalists.

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Historical Fiction: Cooper, Hawthorne, and Others

The self-confidence and nationalism of the newly created United States of America energized fiction as well as nonfiction. Historical fiction took off first, influenced by Sir Walter Scott, an enormously popular British writer who established the genre. Historical fiction was an expression of romanticism in its probings of human nature and emotions and its romanticizing of the American past and the American frontier. The first generations of Puritans in New England, the Salem witchcraft trials, white conflicts with Native Americans, and the American Revolution provided popular subjects for American historical fiction. One of the earliest examples of the genre was Samuel Woodworth's The Champions of Freedom (1816). James Fenimore Cooper was the first American master of the form, however.

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In Cooper's first published novel, Precaution (1820), he consciously imitated British fiction of the time, especially the novels of Jane Austen. With The Spy (1821), however, Cooper began his career as a specifically American novelist. This best-seller is set in New York during the American Revolution and has as its main character a spy working for General George Washington. The Pioneers (1823) is one of a series of five novels called the Leather-Stocking Tales. Over the course of the Leather-Stocking Tales, Cooper developed one of America's first fictional heroes, the white frontiersman Natty Bumppo. In the tales, Bumppo bridges Native American and white cultures through his friendships, while articulating the consequences of further white settlement for Native Americans. Staking a claim for the importance of American history and landscape as an imaginative resource, Cooper continued to write until his death in 1851, profoundly influencing the direction of American prose. Another author who contributed to American historical fiction before mid-century was Lydia Maria Child. Her novel Hobomok (1824) focuses on the relationship between a white woman and a Native American man.

New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was also a master of historical fiction. Influenced to some extent by transcendentalism, Hawthorne’s views of the movement were mixed. His novel The Blithedale Romance (1852) is loosely based on a transcendentalist experiment in communal living at Brook Farm. Still, Hawthorne’s work, with its deep ethical concern about sin, punishment, and atonement, is less optimistic than most transcendental writing. Hawthorne was a descendant of one of the judges at the Salem witch trials, and he set many of his works in Puritan New England and during early crises in American history. The Scarlet Letter (1850), a story of rebellion within an emotionally constricted Puritan society, is an undisputed masterpiece in its powerful psychological insights. Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) collects some of his best short stories and sketches, including “Roger Malvin’s Burial” and “Young Goodman Brown.”

The first African American known to have published a novel was William Wells Brown, who combined historical fiction, national legend, and the increasingly divisive subject of race. His novel Clotel (1853) is the fictional account of a child born to Thomas Jefferson and a slave. It was intended to point out the distance between American ideals of liberty and the actual living conditions of American slaves, who also were sons and daughters of that promised liberty.

Harriet E. Wilson was long considered the first African American woman to publish a novel, Our Nig (1859), which focuses on the injustices faced by free blacks in the North. In recent years, however, scholars discovered an earlier novel, The Bondswoman’s Narrative, written by Hannah Crafts. According to research, this unpublished work was written no later than 1853.

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Good and Evil: Melville and Poe

Herman Melville became a close friend of Hawthorne’s after Melville moved to Massachusetts in 1850. Melville, who was born in New York City, worked on a number of ships after his father's financial ruin and death and based several novels on his voyages. Redburn (1849) was inspired by his first voyage as a cabin boy on a ship to Liverpool, England, and White-Jacket (1850) by his last voyage. He also worked on several whaling ships and witnessed the violence of life at sea. These tales of exotic travel adventures brought Melville early success. Ironically, Melville's popularity dropped after the publication of the book now considered a masterpiece of American fiction, Moby Dick (1851). Far removed from his earlier travel narratives, Moby Dick was dedicated to Hawthorne, and like Hawthorne's work was darkly metaphysical, symbolic, and complex. The story of the captain of a whaling boat, Ahab, and his relentless hunt for one whale, Moby Dick is also about the mysterious forces of the universe that overwhelm the individual who seeks to confront and struggle against them. Written in a powerful and varied narrative style, the book includes a magnificent sermon delivered before the ship’s sailing, soliloquies by the ships’ mates, and passages of a technical nature, such as a chapter about whales.

While transcendentalism was fundamentally optimistic, celebrating human creativity and the beauty of nature, Hawthorne and Melville demonstrated that asking questions about the nature of the universe could lead to answers illuminating the darker side of life. In the depths of the imagination, they saw hints of unfathomable evil rather than rays of divine light. Edgar Allan Poe was another writer who inverted transcendentalist promises. In his disturbing prose and poetry, Poe explored the nature of humanity and frightened readers with what he found. His tales are obsessed with death, madness, and violence. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) ranks among the triumphs of romantic horror. Poe also invented the detective story with such works as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). In Poe’s longest story, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838), a sea journey to the South Pole suggests other, more primal journeys—to the center of the mind, to the source of all evil, and toward an all-encompassing void.

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Sentimental Fiction: Stowe

The sentimental novel is a major form of American fiction that grew out of the responses of white writers to the abuses of slavery. The most famous and historically most significant work of American sentimental fiction is Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sentimental fiction aimed to arouse pity for the oppressed and offered a natural form for novelists writing about the evils of slavery. In Stowe's novel and in novels that followed in this tradition, pity for the oppressed did not necessitate revolutionary change but rather called for an outpouring of Christian love. Sentimental fiction elicited this “Christian” sympathy from Northern white women in particular by demonstrating how the slave system violated the most basic bonds of humanity, such as that between mother and child.

Some sentimental fiction focused on gender by showing the dangers faced by young women, who might be driven to compromise their morals as a result of extreme poverty or the loss of their family and subsequent loss of social position. One such novel was Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850).

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The Civil War and After

President Abraham Lincoln is credited with having humorously described Stowe as 'the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.' Uncle Tom’s Cabin was powerful as propaganda and expressed the deep antislavery feelings of the North. Lincoln himself was among the greatest American orators of the 19th century and can be included in the roster of significant American writers because of the measured succinctness of his prose. Moved to despair by the tragic conflict of the Civil War (1861-1865), he turned American oratory away from the ornate rhetoric of statesman Daniel Webster to the inspirational simplicity of his 1863 Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address in 1865. Few other American public figures have equaled Lincoln's command of forceful, precise, and inspiring prose.

Two movements became increasingly important in American fiction after the Civil War: regionalism and realism. As the country expanded in area and population, regional differences became more apparent and of greater interest, especially to people in the established cultural centers of the East. Increasing urbanization and the expansion of the railroads had made more of the country accessible. Regional literature would do the same. Realism emerged as a literary movement in Europe in the 1850s. In reaction to romanticism, it emphasized the everyday and through detailed description re-created specific locations, incidents, and social classes. Like regionalism, it reveled in the particular.

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