Your search returned 586 results in 224 document sections:

... 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 ...
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 1: travellers and explorers, 1583-1763 (search)
ion, or wandered into the valleys beyond the surrounding ridges, but very rarely were observations or physical experiences committed to paper. The impulse to print the reports of travellers did not come until there was land to be sold. The seventeenth-century promoters of speculation carried on the practice of distributing tracts telling about the property they wished others to buy. The little pamphlets issued by the Virginia Company, by the Massachusetts Agents, by William Penn in German, Dutch, and French as well as in English, by the Scots Proprietors of the Jerseys, and by the Lords of Carolina, are today worth more money than many of the acres that they describe. Most of these early tracts were written by men who had travelled through the regions of which they wrote. Rarely is there any substantial reason for doubting the honesty of what was reported as the result of actual observation. What I write, is what I have proved, remarks one of the frankest of these promoters of a
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 2: the historians, 1607-1783 (search)
e history of Plymouth plantation is a Puritan book in the best sense. Its author was a man of intelligence, whose moderate educational opportunities had been supplemented by earnest and industrious private studies. He knew the Latin, Greek, and Dutch languages, and in his old age taught himself Hebrew so that he might read the oracles of God in the form in which they originally appeared. His History is loosely annalistic, but a direct and simple style gives charm, as a sincere faith in Puritiam Smith and a History of New Jersey (1765) by Samuel Smith. The author of the former was a high official in New York and had much ability. He was a tory, and the unpopularity he acquired on that account was shared by his book. Unable to read Dutch, he had an inadequate idea of the early history of the colony; but for the English period the book has maintained an honourable position to this day. It is well written and, making due allowances, it is equal to the standard of historical literat
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 1, Colonial and Revolutionary Literature: Early National Literature: Part I (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 4: Irving (search)
t describing Mr. Knickerbocker and asking for information about him. When acknowledgment of the authorship of the book was finally made by Irving, it was difficult for his fellow New Yorkers to believe that this unsuccessful young lawyer and attractive man about town could have produced a work giving evidence of such maturity and literary power. He had secured an excellent position in New York society, a society which in the earlier years of the century was still largely made up of the old Dutch families. In the veracious chronicle of Mr. Knickerbocker free use was made of the names of these historic families, and it is related that not a few of the young author's Dutch friends found it difficult to accord forgiveness for the liberty that had been taken with their honourable ancestors in making them the heroes of such rollicking episodes. After a brief editorial experience in charge of a Philadelphia magazine called the Analectic, to which he contributed some essays later includ
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature, Chapter 4: the New York period (search)
ed. The Knickerbocker history of New York, published two years later, brought Irving his first real fame. He employed his theme, a burlesque history of the three Dutch governors of New York, as a stalking-horse for purposes of light satire. Everybody in New York enjoyed it except a few descendants of the old Dutch worthies with Dutch worthies with whose names he had made free; and it won high praise abroad, notably from Walter Scott. The book was a real success. Irving had proved himself master of a fluent humorous style which might have been employed indefinitely in the treatment of similar themes. But for many years he was, according to the New York standard, a man of f cloak — a short garment that hung from the shoulders like the cape of a coat. There was a chirping, cheery, oldschool air in his appearance which was undeniably Dutch, and most harmonious with the associations of his writings. My only personal observation of Washington Irving was too much like his description of his only glimps
Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2 (ed. Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950.), Chapter 1: Whitman (search)
s. Whitman, for his part, could hardly have been, or wished to be, a flower; it was not in his ancestry, his education, or his environment. Blending in his own nature the courage, the determination, and the uncompromising Puritan idealism of good, if somewhat decadent, English ancestry with the placid slowness, This description does not allow for a high temper, displayed on occasion, which Whitman seems to have inherited from his father. selfesteem, stubbornness, and mysticism of better Dutch (and Quaker) ancestry, Walt Shortened from Walter to distinguish the son from his father, but not used in connection with his published writings until 1855. Whitman was born 31 May, 1819, at the hamlet of West Hills, a few miles south of Huntington, Long Island. His father, Walter Whitman, was a farmer and later a somewhat nomadic carpenter and moderately successful housebuilder, who, although, like the poet's excellent mother, he had even less education than their nine children were des
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 1: the pioneers (search)
But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of individual behavior in the various colonies that began to dot the seaboard, certain qualities demanded by the new surroundings are felt in colonial life and in colonial writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at least that degree of order essential to the existence of a camp. It was not in vain that John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at Jamestown by the stern edict: He that will not work, neither shall he eat. Dutch and Quaker colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of thrift. Soon there was work enough for all, at good wages, but the lesson had been taught. It gave Franklin's Poor Richard mottoes their flavor of homely, experienced truth. Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the equality and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation from Europe, led to political independence. The pioneer learned to make things for himself instead of sending to London for
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 5: the Knickerbocker group (search)
ate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first published poem in the Newburyport Free Press. Walt Whitman was a barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age, was watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood. But it was Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth century England would be interested in American books. The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of Irving's happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian of New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and fathered upon him a witty parody of Dr. Mitchill's grave Picture of New York. To read Irving's chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and most agreeable of phenomena, namely, the actual beginning of a legend which the world is unwilling to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with laughter, and reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain New Yorkers were slow to see the joke. Irving was himself
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 7: romance, poetry, and history (search)
His young friend Motley, of Dutch Republic fame, was another Boston Brahmin, born in the year of Prescott's graduation from college. IHe attended George Bancroft's school, went to Harvard in due course, where he knew Holmes, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips, and at Gottingen became a warm friend of a dog-lover and duelist named Bismarck. Young Motley wrote a couple of unsuccessful novels, dabbled in diplomacy, politics, and review-writing, and finally, encouraged by Prescott, settled down upon Dutch history, went to Europe to work up his material in 1851, and, after five years, scored an immense triumph with his Rise of the Dutch Republic. He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and Calvinists, and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirable sketcher of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing special chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to the characteristics of a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced the four vol
Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters, Chapter 8: Poe and Whitman (search)
istence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the separate person, the single man of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address. I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out. Sometimes this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb. So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life. It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story, and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as was also George Eliot. Whitman's father was a carpenter, who leaned to the Quakers. There were many children. When little Walt --as he was called, to distinguish him from his father, Walter — was four, the family moved to Brooklyn. The boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried type-setting, teaching, and editing a country newspaper on Long Island. He was a big, dark-haired fel
James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen, Harriet Beecher Stowe. (search)
over one hundred and fifty thousand copies were sold in America, and within a few years it reached a sale of nearly five hundred thousand copies. The first London edition was published in May, 1852. The next September, the publishers furnished to one house alone, ten thousand copies each day for four weeks; making a sale of two hundred and forty thousand copies in one month. Before the end of the year 1852, the book had been translated into the Spanish, Italian, French, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Flemish, German, Polish, and Magyar languages. Ere long it was translated into every European language, and also into Arabic and Armenian. There is a bookcase in the British Museum, filled with its various translations, editions, and versions. In Italy, the powers that be published an edition in which all allusions to Christ were changed to the Virgin Mary,a piece of craftiness that argues better for the book than for its mutilators. But remarkable as was the literary popularity of th
... 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 ...