When Americans began to write in larger numbers, there was at first close adherence to English models. For a while it seemed as if American literature would be only a feeble imitation of these models, but a change finally came. It is to be hoped, however, that American writers of the future will never cease to learn from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, and Wordsworth.
It is now more than one hundred years since Benjamin Franklin, the great American philosopher of the practical, died, and yet several European nations reprint nearly every year some of his sayings, which continue to influence the masses.
If readers were eager and available, so were writers. While it was nearly impossible until the last decades of the nineteenth century for an author to make a living "by the pen," writing could eke out a skimpy income from other sources: thus the goodly number of women and clergymen who wrote for every kind of publication-book or magazine, for child or adult readers.
For women, authorship was a welcome addition to the short list of occupations open to them. And despite conventional opinion, there were many who needed to make their own way-women who were single or inadequately supported, widowed, or divorced.
Through its association with high culture-the art, languages, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, the art and poetry of the European Renaissance and Baroque-the classical tradition represented a conservative, past-oriented, stable element in American culture.
On the one hand, the nineteenth-century tendency to stress the "Apollonian" and proto-Christian side of classical antiquity complements the age's idealized picture of the noble, temperate, dignified world of classical antiquity, in particular Greece. On the other hand, the classical literatures, through their use of ancient history and traditional myths, their open treatment of sexuality, and their disruptive grappling with the dark side of the human psyche, could provide writers with a medium through which to question and subvert the dominant values of nineteenth-century America.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW is the most widely read of all the American poets and the one that has the closest hold upon the hearts of the American people. Writers of fiction were numerous during the first half of the century, in the South as well as in the North. While Cooper and Poe were the only ones who attained eminence in this field, there was no lack of story-telling, and in several instances a wide local reputation was built upon the success of a single book.
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