 Industrial Revolution  Abolitionist Movement  Follows Age of Reason: most literature was instructional, about truth and values (Franklin, Jefferson, Paine)

 Short stories, novels, poetry  Writers believed that imagination was preferable to reason or fact  Writing could be interpreted 2 ways  surface meaning and in-depth meaning  Focus on inner feelings  Literature for entertainment’s sake

Also called “Gothic Literature”  Use of supernatural  Characters with both evil and good characteristics  Dark landscapes  Depressed characters

 Psychology  Sin  Evil  Folly of man

 Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven,” “The Pit and the Pendulum”  Washington Irving: “The Devil and Tom Walker”  Herman Melville: Moby Dick  Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown,” The Scarlet Letter

 1 st famous American writer (influenced Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner)  Wrote short stories, travel books, satires  Wrote under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker (A History of New York…) NY Knicks  Famous for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

 Encounter-with-the-devil tale  Setting: New England, 1720s  Puritanism fading  Commercialism on the rise

 Terrible childhood  Mom died when he was ___; dad abandoned him  Taken in by Allan family, never adopted  Married his cousin, Virginia Clem  She died shortly thereafter  Poe became alcohol and drug addict  Created modern short story and detective story, though not famous during his life  Died at 40, found on the street