The Origins of American Literature
H. Hedge, James Freeman
Clark, Elizabeth Peabody, Theodore Parker, Jones Very, and W.H. Channing. But the
arch-advocates in literature of most that the transcendentalists stood for were Emerson
and Thoreau; and the two documents which most definitely give literary expression to
their views were Emerson's Nature (1836) and Thoreau's Walden (1854).
East coast dominance of the Am lit scene was broken by Mark Twain, the pen-
name of Samuel Longhorne Clemens (1835-1910). Twain, who grew up in Missouri
along the banks of the Mississippi, wrote about cowboys, stagecoach drivers and low-life
criminals people living in the West. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), he
paints a realistic picture of the life of two young boys growing up in the Mississippi area.
The themes of childhood and nature recur in his masterpiece The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1885). In both these works Mark Twain shows his deep distrust of
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