CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION

BOOK ONE – THE WORLD OF WASHINGTON IRVING
Philadelphia in 1800
The Land of Yankees
The Ductch along the Hudson
Washington Irving
Irving and Scott
James Fenimore Cooper
Later Knickerbockers
The West
Frontier Life Contributes to National Literature
The South
Edgar Allan Poe
William Cullen Bryant
Painters and Writers

BOOK TWO – THE FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND
Boston and Cambridge
New England Minds Lead the Nation. Widening Horizons.
New England Historians Fulfill Vital Function
The Hour had Struck for Poets
Young Boston Goes to Sea
Transcendentalism Explores the Inner Life
The Sage of Concord
Henry Thoreau
Intellectual Whirlpools
Brook Farm
The Alcott Family
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Anti-Slavery Writers
Whittier, Poet-Laureate of New England
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
James Russell Lowell
Literary Boston. Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Saturday Club
Epilogue

BOOK THREE – THE TIMES OF MELVILLE AND WHITMAN
New York in the Fifties
Tales of the Travellers
Herman Melville
Melville’s Moby Dick
Melville and Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman: The Image of the Poet
The Far West
The World of Bret Harte
Cowboys Bandits and Books. The Midwest
Sidney Lanier
Negro Folklore Charms the Nation
Regional Writing
George W. Cable
Mark Twain

BOOK FOUR – NEW ENGLAND: INDIAN SUMMER
Henry Adams
Practicality Triumphant
The Rise of Realism
Writers Strive for a Better World
The Problems of Europe in American Breasts
Henry James
Emily Dickinson
Women Writers Gain in Influence
Poetry in Decline

BOOK FIVE – THE CONFIDENT YEARS
The Ghetto a School for Writers
Stephen Crane
Reformers-Reporters-Writers
O. Henry
New York High Society
Chicago
The West’s New Voices
Theodore Dreiser
Small Town
Willa Cather
Saving the Cowboy from Oblivion
San Francisco in the Nineties
Jack London
Ellen Glasgow
The Southwest
Gertrude Stein
Mencken of Baltimore
Sinclair Lewis
The Imagists
Eugene O’Neill
Poetic Renaissance
Epilogue