SOURCE: “The Myth of Hiawatha,” in Literature and History, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 58-78.

In the following essay, Carr examines The Song of Hiawatha as an example of how American literature was striving to achieve a unique identity separate from Europe during the early nineteenth century, and comments on the pros and cons of this self-conscious pursuit.

… the vengeful ghost lurking in the back of the troubled American mind

(Gary Snyder)

This is the true myth of America …

(D. H. Lawrence)

At the beginning of [F. O.] Mattheissen's famous study of the birth of American literature, he hesitates for a moment, awkwardly aware of the anomaly of his title. American Renaissance? The American writers he celebrates are in his terms no rebirth, but nativity itself—or rather, American literature sprang into being in the 1850s in ‘first maturity’ the creation of the American ‘new man’. This puzzle slips...