SOURCE: “Hiawatha and Its Predecessors,” in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, October, 1932, pp. 321-43.

In the following essay, Schramm reminds readers that Hiawatha was not the first poem about American Indians by a white man, and traces some of the traditions Longfellow employs in his poem.

When Hiawatha was published, November 10, 1855, its success was so immediate and far reaching that other verse narratives of Indian life were for the moment forgotten. Four thousand copies were sold on the day of publication; it became almost at once the centre of a hot critical controversy; it was parodied, set to music, dramatized, and translated into other languages—even into Latin. Two months later, when the poem was still selling at the rate of three hundred a day in Boston, it had been recognized as the poem of the American Indian. The result was that Hiawatha cast a deep shadow on its...