1. American Renaissance Literature
The
American Renaissance in
Literature
An introduction to the important figures of American Literature from

2. What is a “Renaissance?”
Renaissance – the revival of art and literature under the influence of classical models in the 14th–16th centuries.
A renaissance simply refers to a revival of or renewed interest in something:
Ex: Rail travel is enjoying a renaissance.
The American preoccupation with nationalism and creating a new national identity during this time came to be known as the American Renaissance.
In American Literature, the “American Renaissance” is the name sometimes given to a flourishing of distinctively American literature in the period before the Civil War.

3. “American Renaissance”
In American literature, the “American Renaissance” tends to focus most on the period of 1840 to 1855, during which many of the works most widely considered American masterpieces were produced.
But this period marked other important events in American literary history as well, including the “Golden Age” of American magazines; the beginnings of mass production of novels and other popular writing; and the increasing prominence of women writers.

4. “American Renaissance”
This “renaissance” is represented by the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman.
Its focus was the period roughly from 1850 to 1855 in which all these writers but Emerson and Poe published what would, by our present time, come to be thought of as their masterpieces:
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden
Walt Whitman’s many editions of Leaves of Grass

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, philosopher, poet, and leader of the transcendentalist movement in the early 19th century.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature.
In 1837, Emerson befriended Henry David Thoreau. Though they had likely met as early as 1835, in the fall of 1837, Emerson asked Thoreau, “Do you keep a journal?” The question went on to have a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau and they became great friends as a result.
Some of his most famous works include:
Essays: Self-Reliance, The Poet, The American Scholar, & Nature.
Collections: Poems and Representative Men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men in particular is included in the canon of the American Renaissance even though it, like most of Emerson's best-known texts, preceded the period slightly.
“Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.”

6. Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, sage writer and philosopher.
He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.
“Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.”

7. Henry David Thoreau Walden
Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small self-built house on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson in a forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, about 1.5 miles from his family home.
Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847.
Over several years, he worked to pay off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript.
In 1854, he published Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond.
The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development.
Walden at first won few admirers, but today critics regard it as a classic American book that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

8. Nathaniel Hawthorne “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer.
Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College and graduated in 1825; his classmates included future president Franklin Pierce and future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales.
The Scarlet Letter, perhaps his most famous novel, was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels.
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

9. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Much of Hawthorne’s writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration.
His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce.
Hawthorne is best known today for his many short stories (he called them “tales”) and his four major romances written between 1850 and 1860:
The Scarlet Letter (1850)
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
The Blithedale Romance (1852)
The Marble Faun (1860)
“Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

10. Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter (1850) is a novel written by, and is considered the magnum opus (“greatest achievement”) of, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Set in 17th century Puritan Boston, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who gives birth after committing adultery and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.
The book’s immediate and lasting success is due to the way it addresses spiritual and moral issues from a uniquely American standpoint. In 1850, adultery was an extremely risqué subject, but because Hawthorne had the support of the New England literary establishment, it passed easily into the realm of appropriate reading.
The Scarlet Letter was also one of the first mass-produced books in America. 20th century writer D. H. Lawrence said that “there could be no more perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter.”

11. Nathaniel Hawthorne
The contemporary response to Hawthorne’s work praised his sentimentality and moral purity while more modern evaluations focus on the dark psychological complexity.
One of these contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote important though largely unflattering reviews of both Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. Poe’s negative assessment was partly due to his own contempt of allegory, moral tales, and his chronic accusations of plagiarism though, he admitted:
“The style of Hawthorne is purity itself. His tone is singularly effective — wild, plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes…we look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing act, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.”
Herman Melville dedicated his novel, Moby-Dick (1851) to Hawthorne, stating “In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

12. Herman Melville
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. His first three books gained much attention, though they were not bestsellers by any means, and his popularity declined sharply after only a few years.
After a variety of jobs in his teens, Melville joined a whaler sailing for the South Seas in On that trip, Melville and a crewmate jumped ship and lived for several weeks with a native tribe.
Upon his return to America, Melville transformed that experience into Typee (1846), a popular adventure tale that established him as a literary celebrity.
A sequel, Omoo, soon followed, but Melville's appeal was dampened by his more philosophical works such as Mardi (1849), Pierre (1852), and even Moby-Dick (1851).
“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”

13. Herman Melville
Critics of these novels declared Melville “unbalanced,” and Melville had to struggle to regain the economic and critical popularity he had enjoyed with his earlier writing. After Pierre (1852), he primarily wrote short stories for magazines like Harper’s.
By 1876, all of his books were out of print. In the later years of his life and during the years after his death he was recognized, if at all, as only a minor figure in American literature.
Financial concerns burdened the family for years, but an inheritance late in life allowed Melville to work on his final masterpiece, Billy Budd, Sailor.
Only after his death did Melville rise from the ranks of second-rate adventure novelists to his present status as one of the most important American writers.

14. Herman Melville Moby-Dick
Herman Melville came back into prominence with the publication of two biographical books by Raymond Weaver in the 1920s that examined his life and literary works in greater depth.
Easily Melville’s most famous work today, Moby-Dick, or The Whale, tells the adventures of the wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whale-ship “Pequod,” commanded by Captain Ahab.
Ishmael soon learns that Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whale-ships know of Moby-Dick, and fewer yet have encountered him.
In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off his leg. Ahab intends to take revenge.

15. Herman Melville Moby-Dick
The first line of Chapter One — “Call me Ishmael.” — is one of the most famous opening lines in literature.
In Moby-Dick, Melville employs stylized language, symbolism, and metaphor to explore numerous complex themes.
Through the main character’s journey, the concepts of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of gods are all examined as Ishmael speculates upon his personal beliefs and his place in the universe.
The narrator’s reflections, along with his descriptions of a sailor’s life aboard a whaling ship, are woven into the narrative along with Shakespearean literary devices such as stage directions, extended soliloquies and asides.
Moby-Dick is now considered one of the greatest novels in all of the English language.

16. Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American poet, short-story writer, editor and literary critic.
Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective- fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.
He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
Born to the teenage actors Elizabeth Arnold and David Poe Jr. (in a time when acting was a highly disreputable career), Edgar Allan Poe was raised by a Richmond, Virginia, merchant named John Allan when both his parents died.
“The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”

17. Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s father sent him to the University of Virginia, but he left after a quarrel with him in and sought out his father’s relatives in Baltimore, Maryland.
In Baltimore he published his first volume of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, and later secretly married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. He moved with his wife and her mother to Richmond, Philadelphia, and then New York City, editing magazines and newspapers in each city but finding it difficult to hold onto a job.
Poe’s horror tales and detective stories (a genre he created) were written to capture the fancy of the popular reading public, but he earned his national reputation through a large number of critical essays and sketches. With the publication of “The Raven” (1845), Poe’s fame was ensured, but he was not succeeding as well in his personal life.
His wife died in 1847, and Poe himself was increasingly ill and drinking uncontrollably. He died under mysterious circumstances on a trip to Baltimore, four days after being found intoxicated near a polling booth on Election Day, 1849.

18. Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven”
“The Raven,” arguably Poe’s most famous work, is a narrative, first published in January It is noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere.
It tells of a talking raven’s mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow descent into madness.
The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. The raven, sitting on a bust of Pallas, seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word “Nevermore.”
The poem also makes use of a number of folk and classical references.

19. Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven”

20. Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven”
Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically, not maniacally as many had claimed. His intention was to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explains in his 1846 follow-up essay “The Philosophy of Composition.”
The first publication of “The Raven” on January 29, 1845, in the New York Evening Mirror made Poe widely popular in his lifetime. The poem was soon reprinted, parodied, and illustrated.
Although critical opinion is divided as to its status, it remains one of the most famous poems ever written.

21. Walt Whitman “Be curious, not judgmental.”
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist.
Born on Long Island and raised in Brooklyn, Walt Whitman left school at eleven and found work as an office boy, a journeyman printer, and a teacher.
He started his own newspaper when he was nineteen and subsequently went on to edit and contribute to several prominent New York periodicals.
In 1855 Whitman published his first book, Leaves of Grass, a collection of twelve poems that both placed humankind within a transcendent spirituality and celebrated physical pleasure.
As a hospital attendant during the Civil War, Whitman cared for wounded soldiers and in the months following the end of the war worked for the Interior Department, from which he was fired for the sexual content of Leaves of Grass, then in a revised edition.
“Be curious, not judgmental.”

22. Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
The idea for Leaves of Grass is believed to have originated in an essay called The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1845, which expressed the need for the United States to have its own new and unique poet to write about the new country’s virtues and vices.
This book is notable for its delight in and praise of the senses during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral.
Leaves of Grass (particularly the first edition) was influenced by the Transcendentalist movement, and it praises nature and the individual human’s role in it.
Among the best known poems in the collection are “Song of Myself,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and in later editions, Whitman’s elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death.

23. Walt Whitman
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.
All told, Whitman published six editions of this book, which eventually contained some 389 poems.

24. The Impact of the “American Renaissance”
The American Renaissance covered a period of approximately forty years, an age of unprecedented confidence and eloquence during which authors of the new republic, centered in New England and the Hudson Valley, produced poems, essays, and fiction addressing the promise and specialness of life in the new country.
Along with the political and moral crisis culminating in the Civil War, many technological and social changes—the railroad, the telegraph, photography, powered presses, and a quantum leap in the availability of inexpensive books, newspapers, and journals—had enormous impact on American literary life.
The effects of these forces emerge in American hybrids of European Romanticism. For an earlier generation of farmers, settlers, and statesmen like Thomas Jefferson, the American wilderness was chaotic, holding great promise but inhuman in scale, and essentially without a past.
This all began to change towards the mid-19th century as American authors and artists began to view nature differently.

25. The Impact of the “American Renaissance”
During this time, the American short story was invented by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, and lyric poets such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman achieved voices and forms expressive of a vast landscape and a diverse people.
The intellectual life of the young republic began to process and reflect upon the nation's founding democratic values.
These developments grew out of a cultural imperative for new ways of thinking and the need to forge a national identity free from England and more in tune with the westward expansion and other cultural changes taking place on American soil.
Emily Dickinson, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and others constructed a consistent, powerful, literary presence for women.
During this period, many conversations began—about human worth, culture, and the American natural context—that continue in the present.

26. The End! PowerPoint presentation completed by: Joshua Miller
The information contained within this presentation has been supplemented from various sources including The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Wikipedia, as well as information of my own.