Following the influx of the puritanical style of writing in America during the 17th Century by the Founding Fathers, it could be said that what we now know as the collective `American writing' was once created almost as an effort to distance its own style from that of other European styles.

Perhaps not being incredibly popular outside their own circle of influence, writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists began, in the 19th Century, to weave a new form of writing using philosophy as the `vehicle of thought' . While this allowed them to explore new and untouched areas in the mind, it also greatly influenced many later writers from Henry Thoreau to the more `popular' and recent Mark Twain.

Let us begin with Henry Thoreau's Walden. While Thoreau was educated in Harvard University, he lived, through a time of vast change in America. During a rise...