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The American Renaissance

The founding moment of American letters, around the mid-nineteenth century.

Around 1850, within five years, the United States published a scarlet letter sewn on a woman's breast, a captain's chase after a white whale, a book of free verse that begins by celebrating itself, and the journal of a man withdrawn beside a pond. These books, poorly sold in their authors' lifetimes, founded a national literature that no longer aped England: its subjects are Puritan sin, the sea, nature and democracy. Emily Dickinson was writing at the same time, almost unpublished, more than seventeen hundred poems.

works 7

  • EssayNatureRalph Waldo Emerson · 1836An age that looks at the universe through the eyes of the fathers; these pages offer it an original relation to the universe, sought alone, in a field.LiteraturePublic domain
  • PoetryThe RavenEdgar Allan Poe · 1845For its author, the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetic subject there is; these verses entrust the mourning to a bird that knows only one word.LiteraturePublic domain
  • NovelThe Scarlet LetterNathaniel Hawthorne · 1850A Puritan community punishes the offence in public and gives shame a visible form, worn on the body. The novel looks at what it costs the woman who displays it, and the man who hides it.LiteraturePublic domain
  • NovelMoby-DickHerman Melville · 1851American whalers then set out on voyages of several years to fetch sperm oil from the other side of the world; these pages give the detail of it and use it for something else.LiteraturePublic domain
  • NarrativeWaldenHenry David Thoreau · 1854The railway now runs alongside the pond. This text sets against the age a calculation: what it takes to live, and what the rest costs in life.LiteraturePublic domain
  • PoetryLeaves of GrassWalt Whitman · 1855This collection arrives without metre or rhyme and without an author's name, preceded by the portrait of a man in shirtsleeves who speaks of his flesh and that of others.LiteraturePublic domain
  • PoetryComplete PoemsEmily Dickinson · 1960Short poems, sent by the hundred to those close to her but almost never printed, whose punctuation and concision baffled the first editors.Literature