San Antonio College Library

Presents thirteen essays on important American authors from the 1830s to the 1860s, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Herman Melville.

Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Tucker, Samuel Low, Royall Tyler, Charles Crawford, Joseph Brown Ladd, Philip Freneau, Hugh Henry, John Blair Linn, William Dunlap, Thomas Branagan, Joseph Dennie, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving.

Historical survey of America's self-discovery in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War. Daniel J. Boorstin, one of America's great historians, focuses on American ingenuity and emergent nationalism in this middle book of the Americans trilogy, dealing with a period extending roughly from the Revolution to the Civil War. Like its two companion volumes, The National Experience is a sometimes quirky look at how certain patterns of living...

However much Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville differ as writers, says Gilmore, they greatly resemble one another in recognizing a market culture as their common adversary. In such an environment, everything--including literature--is for sale, and customer satisfaction is achieved at the cost of personal integrity. Limiting discussion to a few works such as Nature, Walden, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby Dick, and "Bartleby,"...

"Writing beyond Prophecy offers a new interpretation of the American Renaissance by drawing attention to a cluster of later, rarely studied works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Identifying a line of writing from Emerson's Conduct of Life to Hawthorne's posthumously published Elixir of Life manuscript to Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Martin Kevorkian demonstrates how these authors wrestled...