The mid-19th cent was a period of astonishing literary creativity in Am lit. In the short space of 6 years, four monumental lit works were published: Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804-64) The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville's (1819-91) Moby Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau's (1817-62) Walden (1854) and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). This period witnessed the highest lit expression of the Puritan tradition and the emergence of a new cultural and philosophical movement, Transcendentalism. Although the Am frontier was being pushed westward, Massachusetts and Virginia, the Puritan strongholds in the east, remained the centre of cultural activity. The Puritan heritage is clearly evident in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote about the conflict between the good and evil set in the dark, Puritan, New England past. In his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter he uses a mixture of fantasy and realism,
Since Melville presents the study within a fictional context, voiced by a fictional character in the narrative, it is arguable whether or not Melville intended the classification as a serious scientific contribution. Moreover, Melville includes the larger members of the Cetaceans, as well as the porpoises (dolphins). It is quite possible that in the case of the Duodecimo whales (porpoises), Melville has unknowingly combined many disparate species into a single "chapter". Transcendentalism and its importance for the development of the Americans' outlook. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry David Thoreau. Literature of Abolitionism. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as a powerful exposure of slavery. Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest to the
of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often utilize slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two subjects which infused her letters to friends. Walter Whitman Walter Whitman (May 31, 1819 March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War in addition to publishing his poetry. Early in
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