American Renaissance (literature)

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This article is about the American Renaissance in literature. For the use of the term in architecture and the arts, see American Renaissance. For the white nationalist magazine, see American Renaissance (magazine).

In American literature, the American Renaissance was the mid-19th century, and especially the period roughly from 1850 to 1855, during which many of the works most widely considered American masterpieces were produced. These included Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Walt Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men (though most of Emerson's best-known texts preceded the period slightly). The period was first named and critically discussed by F. O. Matthiessen in his 1941 book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. It continues as a central term in American studies.


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