American Lit: Early to Mid-1800's Quiz

Answer: The American Scholar

Before "The American Scholar" was published in "Nature, Addresses, and Lectures" in 1949, it was refered to as "An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837". Emerson had grown worried about the state of American society because he believed too many people had become "mere thinkers", individuals who were "parrot[s] of other men's thinking" instead of thinking for themselves. He very radically explained, "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books". He also blasted the approach to an education that did not require an active role in the world of life around the scholar: "There goes in the world a notion that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian,--as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe".

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who was for a few years of his life a Unitarian minister, became one of the major proponents of transcendentalism, perhaps one of the few American religions and philosophies. The transcendental approach to life required that an individual attempt to rise above a limited materialistic and mundane lifestyle through an awareness of a greater spirituality. This attempt to transcend a worldly existence was bolstered by returning to nature, which allowed one a clearer and more immediate understanding of and relationship with God or The Oversoul.

Answer: Washington Irving

Washington Irving (1783-1859) published "Rip Van Winkle" along with "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and several other stories in his 1819 book "The Sketch Book", which he sent to the United States in installments while he was living in England. Irving lived for seventeen years in Europe and became the first United States writer to have an international reputation. In England, Irving met Sir Walter Scott, who had been an admirer of Irving's satirical "History of New York", and was introduced by Scott to several German folktales, many of which became the basis for stories in Irving's "Sketch Book". In fact, many passages from "Rip Van Winkle" are paraphrases of the original Germanic tale.

Irving created an elaborate ruse to foster interest in both his "History of New York" and his stories in "The Sketch Book". He claimed that all of these compositions had been found in the papers left behind by a mysterious Diedrich Knickerbocker, an addled old man who had disappeared from his residence without paying his rent. According to Irving's tall tale, the landlord had sold the papers to make up for the lost rent. In the end, the publicity stunt paid off, and both the "History of New York" and "The Sketch Book" became quite profitable to Irving, who by extension became a celebrity.

Answer: The Last of the Mohicans

James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) published his first book "Precaution" in 1820, the result of a bet he made with his wife that he could write a better book than the one he had been reading to her. Following this rather unnoticed start to his career, in 1821 he published "The Spy", the first important historical romance of the American Revolution. For the rest of his life, he wrote on average a novel per year. While most know Cooper for his historical romance fiction, he is also significant for essentially creating the sea novel (starting with "The Pilot" in 1824), for writing the first serious American novels of manners and sociopolitical novels, and for creating a one of the most popular characters in world literature--Natty Bumppo, also known as Nathaniel Bumppo, Long Rifle, Hawkeye, and Leather-Stocking. Of course, it is the latter name that would be used to refer to the series of five novels in which Bumppo appears. These are "The Pioneers" (1823), "The Last of the Mohicans" (1826), "The Prairie" (1827), "The Pathfinder" (1840), and "The Deerslayer" (1841). However, if a reader wanted to read the novels chronologically according to Bumppo's lifespan, he or she would have to read them in this order: "The Deerslayer", "The Last of the Mohicans", "The Pathfinder", "The Pioneers", and "The Prairie".

Cooper was and has been a widely celebrated American writer who patriotically defended American democracy. However, during his lifetime many of the individuals who lived in his hometown (Cooperstown, named for his father) despised him. They believed him to be poisoned by European aristocratic values because of all of the legal actions he filed against many of them for trespassing and poaching on his land. The fact that his wife was the daughter of parents who had remained loyal to Britain during the American Revolution certainly didn't help matters.

One might notice from the question that the original story of "The Last of the Mohicans" differs from the 1992 film starring Daniel Day Lewis as Natty Bumppo. In the movie, it is the sister Alice who falls in love with the American Indian Uncas and who dies with him in the end. In the novel, Cora is the sister who is romantically connected with Uncas. Many critics have noted that Cora, in the novel, is Alice's half-sister, is descended from slaves, and is "dark haired"; they have sometimes remarked that this was done intentionally by Cooper to help his predominantly white reading audience more readily accept a romantic relationship between a white character and an American Indian. However, that this relationship exists at all helped to humanize the American Indians in the eyes of many who saw them as "savages", and "The Last of the Mohicans" compels that same white reading audience to feel remorse for the suffering of the Indians brought about by European invasion and occupation.

Answer: Hope Leslie

"Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in Massachussetts" is Catharaine Maria Sedgwick's third novel of six, and she also authored several short stories, volumes of children's writings, a highly regarded travel volume, and religious tracts. Sedgwick (1789-1867) was a popular writer during her time and was admired by other professional authors such as Cooper and Poe. However, by the end of the 1800's, she had fallen into obscurity until her reputation was revived in 1987 with the re-publication of "Hope Leslie".

The novel is set in New England during the time of the Pequod War and its aftermath, a time of Puritan dominance in the area during the 1630's and '40's. Sedgwick creates the American Indian character Magawisca, who performs heroic and self-sacrificing deeds, and presents a marriage between an Indian man and a white woman taken captive during her childhood. However, the main character is, of course, Hope Leslie, who not only challenges the patriarchal Puritan codes but carries out a brave rescue of Magawisca.

Answer: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is usually recognized as the author of such novels as "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables"; however, he was a master of the short story as well, some of his most well-known pieces being "Young Goodman Brown", "The Minister's Black Veil", "My Kinsman, Major Molineux", and "Wakefield".

Hawthorne led an interesting life. He was friends with many great Americans, including Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Franklin Pierce. He was a very close friend to Melville for a while and sered as somewhat of a mentor to him. In return, Melville dedicated the pulbication of "Moby Dick" to him and wrote the significant work of literary criticism called "Hawthorne and His Mosses", which is about Hawthorne's story collection. Earlier in his life, Hawthorne met Longfellow and Pierce at Bowdoin College in Maine. Later, Pierce asked Hawthorned to write a biography of his life while Pierce was running for United States President. After getting elected, he rewarded Hawthorne with a consul position in England.

Answer: Thanatopsis

Beyond being a recognized poet, William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) is an important figure in American history for other reasons. He was the editor of New York's "Evening Post" and made it one of America's most respected newspapers. Early in his journalistic career, he was a fervent suppporter of Jacksonian Democracy but later helped create the Free Soil and Republican Parties. He was also instrumental in the creation of Central Park in New York City. He died after a fall from a platform in which he had just delivered a speech during the unveiling of a statue in Central Park.

While Bryant was raised to believe in a more Calvinistic view of a sinfully tainted world from which God had withdrawn, "Thanatopsis" represents Bryant's pantheistic view of nature, a result of his early exposure to the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Having started his poetic career when he did, Bryant's verse had an early impact on the ideas of Emerson, Whitman, and Poe, who all praised him later in their careers. Other famous poems of William Cullen Bryant's are "To a Waterfowl", "A Forest Hymn", and "The Prairies".

Answer: John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) grew up in a Quaker home, and the impact of his family's faith almost cost the United States one of its most significant poets. First, as Quakers, his family believed wholeheartedly in the virtue of hard work, and Whittier at an early age overstrained his health attempting to help out on his family's debt-ridden farm. Furthermore, he was rarely allowed to read any material that was not written by someone of the Quaker faith. At the age of fourteen, however, Whittier was sneaking opportunities to read the verse of the great Scottish poet Robert Burns, and he soon began writing poems of his own following the early Romantic writer's style, meaning Whiiter relied on the use of regional dialect, homely subjects, and a democratic social conscience. In 1826, Whittier published his first poem in a local newspaer run by William Lloyd Garrison, who took notice of the young poet's talent and convinced Whittier's father to allow Whittier a formal education.

In the 1830's, Whittier frequently used his positions as editors of various newspapers to push for support of the abolitionist movement. In 1833, he published the antislavery pamphlet "Justice and Expediency and later helped create the American Anti-Slavery Society. He began to use his poems as well to deliver his abolitionist message. Even "Snow-Bound" contains lines such as these: "All chains from limb and spirit strike, / Uplift the black and white alike; / Scatter before their swift advance / The darkness and the ignorance" and "The cruel lie of caste refute, Old forms recast, and substitute / For Slavery's lash the freeman's will".

John Greenleaf Whittier along with other three-named poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes was considered by American readers one of the "Fireside Poets", poets whose work was suitable for families to read together around the fire in the evening as a source of entertainment.

Answer: The Purloined Letter

You may have recognized "A Scandal in Bohemia" as a Sherlock Holmes story, one of the many by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Poe's three stories highly influenced Doyle, who created a character like Dupin through Sherlock Holmes. Furthermore, Doyle created Dr. Watson to serve as the narrator and chronicler of many of Holmes' adventures and to serve as Holmes' colleague and confidante--just as Poe had created such a character to serve the same purpose in his Dupin stories. (By the way, "The Glass Key" is a Dashiell Hammett novel, and I made up the "Pilfered Penknife".

Poe used "The Purloined Letter" to present his philosophical and psychological position that two kinds of intelligence exist: the mathematical and the poetical. Mathematical intelligence relies on the study and memorization of formulae and storing away of knowledge in the mind to be able to solve the puzzles that arise in life. On the other hand, the poetical kind relies on creative genius and logical deduction; an individual with this kind of intelligence faces the problem first rather than the answers and then creates a solution for that specific problem. Dupin is able to find the stolen letter because he has poetical intelligence while the police have only the mathematical kind. Dupin deduces that if the letter had been hidden in the thief's living quarters, the police would have found it because they had studied every possible way to discover a hidden item. Thus, the stolen item must not have been hidden, and that is exactly where Dupin finds the letter--completely visible to any person looking around in the thief's home.

Of course, Poe preferred the poetical intelligence because he himself was a poet and wanted to be recognized foremost as a poet. Again, history worked out differently in that Poe is celebrated primarily for his fiction; however, he published several poems that people enjoying reading to this day, including "The Raven", "Annabel Lee", "Tamerlane", "City in the Sea", "The Bells", "Sonnet: To Science", and "To Helen" (which is recited by Tom Hanks' character in the Coen Brothers' remake of the movie "The Ladykillers").

Answer: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) had grown increasingly interested in the abolitionist cause. However, two events occurred to push Stowe to write a novel like "Uncle Tom's Cabin". First, her infant son Samuel died of cholera in 1849; devastated by this blow, she was suddenly more sympathetic toward others who found themselves helpless in the face of situations they had no power to control. The death of Little Eva in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is most likely infused with emotion from Stowe's own loss, though Eva is certainly older than her own son Samuel was. Second, the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which made assisting an escaped slave a federal crime. Stowe was personally outraged by the enactment of this law, for she saw it as evidence that the entire nation, and not just the South, was implicated in the atrocity of slavery. She felt something immediately had to be done to confront the horror of slavery, so she began writing her novel.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" went on to become not only a national best seller but also an international sensation. It was translated into twenty-two languages within eight years of its initial publication.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is somewhat of an anomaly for Stowe. Almost everything else she ever wrote fit more into what would be called regionalist writing, for she focused primarily on the people, customs, and landscapes of New England, where she lived most of her entire life. Examples of her regionalist novels are "The Minister's Wooing" (1859), "The Pearl of Orr's Island" (1862), "Oldtown Folks" (1869), and "Poganuc People" (1878).

Answer: Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs (c. 1813-1897) was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina. When her mother died, Jacobs found herself sold to the family of Dr. and Mrs. James Norcom in 1825. As a teenager, she began to attract the unsolicited attention of Dr. Norcom, who harrassed her with sexual advances. This, in turn, drew the abuse of Mrs. Norcom, who sought to take out her anger on the object of her husband's lust. Though she struggled tremendsouly with the morality of her decision, Jacobs could think of no other way to escape the abuse of the Norcoms than through a relationship with another white man, the result of which turned Dr. Norbcom's attention away from her. Eventually, Norcom grew too irritated by Jacobs' presence and his wife's resentment, and he sold Jacobs in 1835 to a country plantation. She escaped from there and sought refuge in the home of her grandmother, who had been emancipated some years earlier. She hid for seven years in grandmother's attic and eventually escaped to the North. Eventually, she was reunited with her children, but they all lived insecurely with the constant threat of being captured and returned to the South as slaves, particularly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.

Jacobs published her narrative with the help of Lydia Maria Child, an important writer and abolitionist of the time who wrote a preface for Jacobs' book, helped edit it, and published it with her own money when the contracted publishing house went bankrupt. Jacobs' goal through the telling of her life story was to gain white female readers' support of the abolitionist movement by showing them how slavery debased and demoralized women through their subjection to white male lust and through the violation of their rights to be with their children. However, she also hoped to win the respect if not the admiration of her readers for her courage to stop the abuse she suffered and her independence to choose a lover rather than have one forced upon her.

Jacobs' narrative and that one composed by Frederick Douglass are the two most celebrated slave narratives.

Answer: Henry David Thoreau

The famous book referred to in the question is, of course, "Walden", one of only two books Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) ever published, the other being "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers". Both books earned him nothing, hardly selling during his own lifetime and certainly not compensating him for the expenses of their publication. Thoreau was not well known by most Americans, and those he lived among considered him an eccentric. They couldn't understand why a man with a Harvard degree would choose to work as a handyman for Ralph Waldo Emerson, who paid him with room and board only. Then he spent two years living in the woods near Walden Pond, which was on property owned by Emerson at that time.

Another of Thoreau's famous pieces is his essay "Resistance to Civil Government" or, as it is sometimes called "Civil Disobedience". However, this second title was not one applied to the essay by Thoreau upon its original publication in 1849 but rather appeared as its title in a posthumous publication of the essay in 1866. His writing of this essay was inspired by his night in a local jail when he refused to pay a mandatory poll tax because the money from that revenue was being used to fund the Mexican War, a war he and others did not support because it began without Congressional consent and was motivated by an attempt to increase the number of slave states in the South.

Answer: Walt Whitman

In "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim" the dead elderly and young soldiers represent how far reaching the impact of the tragedy of the Civil War is while the death of Christ suggests the Civil War has destroyed the country's innocence and purity. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) writes, ". . . I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, / Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies".

A reader must reckon with the word "again" and understand that Whitman is suggesting that just as the innocent Christ was sacrificed once, Americans have sacrificed him yet one more time.

In the book of Matthew of the New Testament of the King James Version of the Bible, Jesus states, "Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me". Whitman implies when we kill one another at war, we kill Christ as well.

More to the point, for Whitman, Americans were destroying the union of their society and by extension the wholeness and purity of society.

Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his transcendental beliefs, Whitman accepted the idea that all of creation existed or should exist in a harmonious whole united by God. Thus, Whitman wrote in the poem "Song of Myself", "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you". Both of these poems can be found in the collection of his life's work entitled "Leaves of Grass".

Answer: Herman Melville

The author of "Moby Dick", Herman Melville (1819-1891) was not a popularly successful writer during his own time. Most people knew him only as the author of his two earliest adventure books "Typee" and "Omoo", both of which he published in 1846 and 1847 respectively. Before he died in 1891, he often commented to others that he would be remembered only for those first two books. Though he had written nine other novels and several short stories and poems, the obituaries published at this death did indeed mention him as the author of only those two books. It wasn't until the 1920's that his reputation was revived by scholars and critics who were beginning to label him "America's Shakespeare".

He certaiinly led an interesting life, nevertheless. In 1841, Melville became a whaler and sailed onboard a ship into the South Pacific. For around four years, he periodically lived among the natives of different islands between different sailing jobs.

Melville was a very socially conscientious writer. "Bartleby the Scrivener", for example, focuses on the rapid growth of the American economy and of society's urbanization and the ensuing anxieties that occurred. The main character of the story suffers from agoraphobia, fear of the marketplace, which was becoming more and more frequently diagnosed by doctors of Melville's time. In a local newspapers were stories of individuals who became depressed and catatonic as Bartleby does in his story.

Answer: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) learned music at an early age--piano and voice--and was tremendously influenced by the hymns she encountered at church and played at home for her family, usually softly after they had retired for the night. It was not the content or messages within the hymns that had an impact on her but rather their structure and rhythm; the meter of her poems often allows them to be sung not only to the tunes of older American hymns but to many other later secular songs. For example, one can sing "Because I could not stop for Death -- / He kindly stopped for me -- / The Carriage held but just Ourselves -- And Immortality" to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and the theme song to the TV show "Gilligan's Island". Try it!

Following her death, Dickinson's poems were found all over her house, not only in various notebooks and letters but on recipe cards, sheets of music, and pages of various books she owned.

Answer: Self-Reliance

In "Self-Reliance", Emerson argues that each person's inner original thoughts are from God; thus, these thoughts are truth. As they are truth, we should not be ashamed to listen to them and follow them. Nevertheless, society attempts to make people conform to its teachings and values, so being an individual within society is very difficult to accomplish. We often fear rejection and being misunderstood and, therefore, choose to follow society's voice.

Besides "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance", Emerson also wrote "Nature", "The Poet", "Experience", "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "Compensation", "Politics", and several others. He also wrote several poems, including "Concord Hymn", "Days", "Each and All", "The Rhodora", "Brahma", and "The Snow-Storm".