American Literature for an American People.

In the early years of the nineteenth century American authors such as William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), Washington Irving (1783-1759), and James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) achieved critical recognition in America and England for their literary merits. While they saw the need for an American literature that treated issues and depicted scenes that were distinctively American, these writers modeled their own poetry or fiction after that of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and other well-known British writers of the time. Yet by 1837, the year in which Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) published his "American Scholar" address, the United States was well on its way to having its own national voice in literature. In "The American Scholar" Emerson proclaimed that "our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," expressing a sentiment widely...