- Noah Webster
- Charles Brockden Brown
- Washington Irving
- James Fenimore Cooper
- William Cullen Bryant
- William H. Prescott
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- John Greenleaf Whittier
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Henry David Thoreau
- James Russell Lowell
- Julia Ward Howe
- Walt Whitman
- Herman Melville
- Edward Everett Hale
- Francis Parkman
- Emily Dickinson
- Louisa May Alcott
- Horatio Alger
- Mark Twain
- Bret Harte
- William Dean Howells
- Sidney Lanier
- Ambrose Bierce
- Henry James
- Joel Chandler Harris
- Emma Lazarus
- Sarah Orne Jewett
- James Whitcomb Riley
- Lafcadio Hearn
- O. Henry
- Clyde Fitch
- Finley Peter Dunne
- Edward Arlington Robinson
- Frank Norris
- Hamlin Garland
- Stephen Crane
- Paul Laurence Dunbar
plus 30 other authors!
This book contains excellent reproductions of autographs, letters, poems and signed and unsigned manuscripts of 72 prominent American authors. The earliest example is a letter by Charles Brockden Brown (1808), the latest, a letter by Francis Hopkinson Smith to J. P. Morgan (1915). Focusing, however, on the mid-nineteenth century, this volume illustrates the rise and flourishing of American literature and is a popular guide to literary autographs of this great period. Almost all of the illustrations are chosen from manuscripts in the vast collection of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City.
Included are pages from novels, selections from a scenario of The Ambassadors by Henry James, an excerpt from a play by Clyde Fitch, poems, inscriptions, dedications, tributes, entries from journals, notebooks and diaries. There are passages from such famous works as Cooper's Deerslayer, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and Blithedale Romance, Thoreau's Walden, Alcott's Jack and Jill. Twain's Life on the Mississippi and Pudd 'nhead Wilson, Crane's Red Badge of Courage; poems like Bryant's "Thanatopsis," Emerson's "Concord Hymn," Longfellow's "The Children's Hour" and "Excelsior," Poe's "Ulahume," Holmes's "Old Ironsides," Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Whitman's "O Captain! my Captain!," Dickinson's "The sun kept stooping," and many more.
The full and informative comments on each entry describe the manuscript and its importance, the life and work of the author, and list the major manuscript collections for him. Transcriptions of the autographs allow you to read them without difficulty. At the end is a checklist of all the American literary manu script holdings from the 17th century to the present in The Pierpont Morgan Library. Charles Ryskamp. Director of the Morgan Library, has written an introduction.
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