Because he died at the age of twenty-five, we cannot know whether Nathaniel Evans would have grown toward that mastery of the craft of poetry necessary to qualify him as more than a minor figure in American literature. Based on what he did produce in a short life, we are obliged to regard him as a minor lyricist, of interest not merely for his potential but also for what he reflected of the literary culture of his time. Evans's poetic career illustrates the difficulties attendant upon the emergence of a national literature in advance of a national political state, the struggles--individual and collective--to forge a literary tradition in the British colonies.

Evans was born in Philadelphia in 1742 and entered the first class of the Academy of Philadelphia in 1751. This school, founded by Benjamin Franklin, played a critical role in Evans's life and in the cultural life of eighteenth-century...