American Literary Masters

Here is a portrait of American literature's founding generation, rendered by an early 20th-century critic who understood he was documenting something unprecedented. Leon H. Vincent examines the writers who, over a transformative half-century beginning with Washington Irving's 1809 "A History of New York," invented the very idea of American letters. Vincent writes with the intimacy of someone recording a living tradition rather than excavating a dead one. His essays on Irving, Bryant, Poe, and Hawthorne trace not merely biographical facts but the audacious project of creating a distinctly American literary voice when none had existed before. The influence of modern French criticism gives his approach a continental sophistication uncommon in American literary commentary of the period. These pages capture a critical moment in cultural self-consciousness: when American writers ceased apologizing for their youth and began celebrating it, when the ghost story and the sketch and the ballad became indigenous American forms. For readers curious about where American literature came from, this volume offers a window into the generation that made it possible.