Early American Literature

On December 10, 1853, one of the most disastrous blazes in the history of New York City lit up the darkness of Pearl Street. Among other casualties, the fire claimed the printing and publishing headquarters of Harper and Brothers. Apparently ignited by an unsuspecting plumber who tossed a match into a pan of turpentine, the catastrophic fire destroyed not only the entire January issue of Harper’s Magazine, but thousands of books, sheets, plates, and proofs as well. Among the many volumes destroyed in the fire were 297 copies of a little-known book about a one-legged captain in pursuit of an enigmatic white whale.



The book of course was Moby-Dick, which was to become one of the most highly regarded and widely read novels in the history of American literature. At the time of the fire, however, the fate of the novel was uncertain. Much to Melville’s disappointment, Moby-Dick had been neither a popular nor a commercial success. The apparent failure of the novel also marked the beginning of Melville’s seeming descent into literary oblivion. Research suggests that the fire on Pearl Street destroyed all but 60 of the remaining unsold copies of the novel. Given the small printing of the first edition and the destruction of most of the remaining copies, and considering that Melville’s name virtually disappeared from the literary establishment for some thirty years after his death, it is remarkable that Moby-Dick ever achieved any level of recognition, let alone its status as one of the finest novels in American literature. It was not until the 1920s that interest in Melville was revived. After years of obscurity, Moby-Dick finally began to attract readers as well as scholarship, ultimately taking its place in the ranks of American masterpieces.



Melville’s story is not unique. The hardships he suffered as a writer are not mere anomalies of the writing and publishing industry in nineteenth-century America. Those who embraced writing as a vocation usually sacrificed a great deal to do so and were rarely rewarded. In fact, many of the writers now firmly established in the canon were largely misunderstood, overlooked or outright ridiculed by both their peers and their readers. Since its discovery, America had long looked to England for literary standards. American writers who conformed to English models were more likely to command popular success; those who did not found themselves locked in a constant struggle between a passion for creative freedom and the need to survive. It was precisely those writers who experimented with new forms and contributed uniquely “American” characteristics to fiction and poetry who forged the literary history of the nineteenth century and shaped the character of American literature for a century to come.



The life of Edgar Allan Poe provides an excellent example of the difficult and sometimes tortuous life of a writer in mid-nineteenth-century America. Mistreated in youth, misunderstood in adulthood, Poe spent much of his life lacking regular employment and doing hackwork in order to survive. Like many other American writers of the time, Poe published his first work at his own expense. Tamerlane (1827) attracted little notice, and Poe shifted from magazine to magazine, holding various positions and publishing what and when he could. Although he did achieve certain accolades during his lifetime for his short stories and for The Raven, Poe spent a significant portion of his life waging intellectual wars against his peers, most notably Longfellow. After his mysterious death in 1849, Poe’s contributions to American literature were largely dismissed and his character in general suffered severe bouts of defamation. Yet his tales of detection set the standard for the genre and his influence extends to a range of writers, including Ambrose Bierce, Hart Crane, and Robert Louis Stevenson, not to mention Baudelaire and Borges.



In 1855, as Melville, at age 36, was accepting the decline of his literary career, and Poe had already been dead for five years, another aspiring writer was hard at work in a printing shop in Brooklyn, overseeing the production of a most unusual book of poetry. Leaves of Grass was a revolutionary text, establishing the foundations of modern poetry and introducing a truly American voice to the poetry canon. Although the exact details preceding the publication of Leaves of Grass are unknown, it seems likely that Whitman had submitted the book to a commercial publisher and it was rejected. Whitman, determined to publish the work, took the manuscript to his friends the Rome brothers who had a printing shop in Brooklyn and they agreed to print it once he raised the money to pay the costs. Whitman, a skilled printer himself, actively participated in the printing, setting the type for at least ten pages. Despite his tireless efforts, however, the work was almost wholly disregarded by the American literary establishment during his lifetime (Emerson’s letter of encouragement is the single exception). Leaves of Grass never reached the common man whom it celebrated. Whitman’s verse--passionate, uninhibited, free from both the “rules” of conventional morality and versification--would never occupy a comfortable position on the Victorian bookshelf. But, like Moby-Dick and Poe’s works, Whitman’s masterpiece eventually earned its rank as a landmark work, taking its place as the most important and influential volume of poetry written in America.



No discussion of this rich epoch in American literary history is complete without one of the pioneers of the psychological novel--Nathaniel Hawthorne. Although Hawthorne’s career had a shaky start, his life as a writer was a happier one than that of many of his peers. Hawthorne published his first novel, Fanshawe, at his own expense in 1828. This novel attracted little notice; however, shortly thereafter, Hawthorne did begin to publish short stories in The Token, an annually published gift book. In 1850, after years of only modest success, Hawthorne produced his greatest work and one of the classic texts of American literature: The Scarlet Letter. The first edition sold out in ten days and the incredible success of the novel guaranteed Hawthorne’s place in American literary history. The Scarlet Letter is now generally recognized as the first symbolic novel in American literature, and clearly provided inspiration to Melville as he worked on Moby-Dick (the finished novel was dedicated to Hawthorne). In addition to the importance of his experimentation with symbolism and psychology in fiction, Hawthorne, like Whitman, contributed a certain “American” flavor to literature, particularly in his close examination and reconstruction of New England’s spiritual history. Like Poe, Hawthorne is recognized as one of the leaders in the development of the short story as a distinctive American genre.



Perhaps the most successful of nineteenth-century American writers, James Fenimore Cooper was one of the most prolific novelists of the age, publishing over thirty novels and numerous other writings during his lifetime. Cooper’s career began rather unexpectedly when his wife challenged his assertion that he could produce a novel superior to the English novel he had been reading to her. Precaution, Cooper’s response to his wife’s challenge, was published in 1820. This conventional novel of manners was followed shortly thereafter by The Spy in 1821, the novel that established Cooper’s popularity. The Spy was distinctive for its dramatic use of Revolutionary War America as the backdrop for a romance. Cooper’s talent for depicting the American scene--the frontiers, the cities, the forts, the wilderness, the native inhabitants, and all of the ensuing conflicts--was developed further in his Leather-Stocking Tales, the series that introduced one of the most memorable characters in American literature: Natty Bumppo. Although Cooper’s novels are in many ways conventional in their adventurous plots and romantic situations, his use of the American scene was a unique contribution to the literature of the period.



While this new breed of distinctly “American” fiction was being pioneered by Cooper, Hawthorne and others, a group of New England intellectuals, including W. E. Channing, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, among others, held informal meetings at Emerson’s home. This group, although certainly not uniform in ideology, became collectively known as the Transcendentalists. The quarterly magazine The Dial was born of their meetings and subsequently became the primary voice of Transcendental thought. But while Alcott, Channing and others were comfortably debating philosophical ideas in the ease of Emerson’s home, one of the most extraordinary works, innovative in both thought and form, was being penned in a stark cabin in the woods near Concord. The book was Walden (1854); the author Henry David Thoreau. Walden records Thoreau’s experience living in a one room cabin in the woods at Walden Pond, describing in depth both the physical and philosophical aspects of his two year residence there. Rather than just spouting the maxims of the Transcendental movement, Thoreau went to the woods to actively practice his philosophical principles: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Living self-sufficiently, he successfully tested his philosophy of self-reliance, individualism and material economy, recording his findings in his voluminous journals. From the journals, Thoreau extracted the 18 essays that comprise the text of Walden, a work that remains one of the most important expressions of Transcendental thought.



Although their initial critical and popular reception was weak, it is clear now that these authors helped to define American literature and contributed incalculably to the shape of the story, the poem, the novel--all literature. As such they are eminently collectible. Moby-Dick, The Raven, The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass, The Last of the Mohicans, Walden--these are just a few of the most prized titles on the collector’s shelf. However, because Melville, Poe, Whitman, Hawthorne, Cooper and Thoreau are the most collectible of nineteenth-century authors, first editions of their works also tend to be the rarest, largely as a result of the circumstances under which they were published. Most first editions were printed in relatively small numbers; works were reprinted only if sales were profitable. For example, of Poe’s works only 750 copies of Tales of the Arabesque and Grotesque (1840) and Tales (1845) were published. Of Tales, only five copies are known to be in the original wrappers. Similarly, only 795 copies of the first edition of Leaves of Grass were printed. The rarity of this book is further complicated by the fact that it is notoriously fragile. Consequently, of the few copies in circulation, fewer yet are in collectible condition. Unfortunately, this tends to be the case with many of the great works published during the nineteenth century.



Another common practice of the period that contributes to the rarity of many titles is remaindering: if a book had ceased to sell, the remaining copies might be sold very cheaply to a wholesaler or bookseller who would then sell them at a significantly reduced rate. Often the remainder consisted only of unbound quires or even unfolded sheets, in which case the wholesaler would have to bind the copies. Wholesalers, undoubtedly seeking the most inexpensive method, might be inclined to choose a cheaper cloth and would often have multi-volume works bound into one volume. Invariably, remaindered copies differ significantly from their regularly sold counterparts.



In physical appearance, most nineteenth-century American books have a certain austere charm. The majority of works were issued in cloth, usually in drab colors-brown, gray, black, blue. (The exception to this is Leaves of Grass, which was issued in elaborately gilt-decorated green cloth and is a very beautiful book). Because cloth can be easily worn or damaged if not cared for properly, many first editions show evidence of wear-fraying to the edges, fading to the gilt, rubbing to the spine, etc. Also, many of the works were printed on inexpensive paper to reduce publishing costs. Consequently, it is not unusual for the pages to be found torn, foxed or embrowned. As a result of these factors, the standards for what is considered collectible condition for nineteenth-century American books vary a great deal from the standards by which books produced during other periods are judged.



Whether your passion is for the symbolic novel, the adventure story, or the philosophy of individualism, the nineteenth century has much to offer the literature collector. Often misunderstood, at times misinterpreted, the writers of this period shaped the character of American literature through their innovations in both style and genre, producing for the first time short stories, novels, poetry and essays that were distinct from British models, and ultimately paving the way for other American greats.