SOURCE: Reynolds, David S. “Black Cats and Delirium Tremens: Temperance and the American Renaissance.” In The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature, edited by David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal, pp. 22-59. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Reynolds asserts that the writers of American Renaissance literature presented a reconceptualization of the temperance movement in the antebellum era.

America's literary flowering between 1835 and 1860, commonly known as the American Renaissance, owed much to the temperance movement that burgeoned in several forms during these years. No other single reform had so widespread an impact upon American literature as temperance, largely because of its extraordinary cultural prominence. In particular, the Washingtonian movement, which during the 1840s infiltrated nearly every area of working-class life, made temperance an inescapable phenomenon. As one popular writer noted in 1846, the typical American town had not only frequent temperance lectures but...