Early National Literature

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bad government. The first professional novelist was Charles Brockden Brown, whose gothic and philosophical romances, beginning with Wieland (1798), anticipated Edgar Allan Poe.
Early in the 19th century, Washington IRVING gained European recognition as America's first genuine man of letters. A History of New York (1809) is a whimsical satire of pedantic historians and literary classics. His best-known tales, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, which was published serially in 1819-20. William Cullen BRYANT emerged in the 1820s as a poet of international stature. His "Thanatopsis" (1817), influenced by the English GRAVEYARD POETS, linked American literature to the emerging English ROMANTICISM. Still, despite European influences, American writers attempted to create a distinctive literature during a time of rising literary nationalism. Noah WEBSTER contributed An American Dictionary of the ...

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