Wikipedia:Today's featured list/March 4, 2022
Articles by American writer John Neal were published in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals and are part of his bibliography. Neal was the United States' first art critic, author of the first history of American literature, the first American to be published in any British literary magazine, and one of the first male advocates of women's rights and feminist causes in the United States. As an early and outspoken theater critic, he drafted a future for American drama that was only partially realized sixty years later. His critiques of literature helped launch the careers of many well-known American authors and his essays on art were recognized as "prophetic". One of the leading critics of his time, his writing also addressed gender, race, slavery, children, education, law, politics, architecture, religion, gymnastics, civics, American history, science, phrenology, travel, language, political economy, and temperance. Literary historian Fred Lewis Pattee found that "his critical judgments have held. Where he condemned, time has almost without exception condemned also." (Full list...)