Chapter Four
The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Fiction
Instead of carefully defining realistic characters through a wealth of detail, as most English or continental novelists did, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe shaped heroic figures larger than life, burning with mythic significance. The typical protagonists of the American Romance are haunted, alienated individuals. Hawthorne's Arthur Dimmesdale or Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Ahab in Moby-Dick, and the many isolated and obsessed characters of Poe's tales are lonely protagonists pitted against unknowable, dark fates that, in some mysterious way, grow out of their deepest unconscious selves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actions of the anguished spirit.
One reason for this fictional exploration into the hidden recesses of the soul is the absence of settled, traditional community life in America. English novelists -- Jane Austen, Charles Dickens (the great favorite), Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, William Thackeray -- lived in a complex, well-articulated, traditional society and shared with their readers attitudes that informed their realistic fiction. American novelists were faced with a history of strife and revolution, a geography of vast wilderness, and a fluid and relatively classless democratic society. American novels frequently reveal a revolutionary absence of tradition. Many English novels show a poor main character rising on the economic and social ladder, perhaps because of a good marriage or the discovery of a hidden aristocratic past. But this buried plot does not challenge the aristocratic social structure of England. On the contrary, it confirms it. The rise of the main character satisfies the wish fulfillment of the mainly middle-class readers.
In contrast, the American novelist had to depend on his or her own devices. America was, in part, an undefined, constantly moving frontier populated by immigrants speaking foreign languages and following strange and crude ways of life. Thus the main character in American literature might find himself alone among cannibal tribes, as in Melville's Typee, or exploring a wilderness like James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, or witnessing lonely visions from the grave, like Poe's solitary individuals, or meeting the devil walking in the forest, like Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown. Virtually all the great American protagonists have been "loners." The democratic American individual had, as it were, to invent himself.
The serious American novelist had to invent new forms as well hence the sprawling, idiosyncratic shape of Melville's novel Moby-Dick and Poe's dreamlike, wandering Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Few American novels achieve formal perfection, even today. Instead of borrowing tested literary methods, Americans tend to invent new creative techniques. In America, it is not enough to be a traditional and definable social unit, for the old and traditional gets left behind; the new, innovative force is the center of attention.
THE ROMANCE
T
he Romance form is dark and forbidding, indicating how difficult
it is to create an identity without a stable society. Most of the
Romantic heroes die in the end: All the sailors except Ishmael
are drowned in Moby-Dick, and the sensitive but sinful
minister
Arthur Dimmesdale dies at the end of The Scarlet Letter.
The
self-divided, tragic note in American literature becomes dominant
in the novels, even before the Civil War of the 1860s manifested
the greater social tragedy of a society at war with itself.
Many of Hawthorne's stories are set in Puritan New England, and
his greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), has become
the
classic portrayal of Puritan America. It tells of the passionate,
forbidden love affair linking a sensitive, religious young man,
the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and the sensuous, beautiful
townsperson, Hester Prynne. Set in Boston around 1650 during
early Puritan colonization, the novel highlights the Calvinistic
obsession with morality, sexual repression, guilt and confession,
and spiritual salvation.
For its time, The Scarlet Letter was a daring and even
subversive
book. Hawthorne's gentle style, remote historical setting, and
ambiguity softened his grim themes and contented the general
public, but sophisticated writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Herman Melville recognized the book's "hellish" power. It treated
issues that were usually suppressed in 19th-century America, such
as the impact of the new, liberating democratic experience on
individual behavior, especially on sexual and religious freedom.
The book is superbly organized and beautifully written.
Appropriately, it uses allegory, a technique the early Puritan
colonists themselves practiced.
Hawthorne's reputation rests on his other novels and tales as
well. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he again
returns
to New England's history. The crumbling of the "house" refers to
a family in Salem as well as to the actual structure. The theme
concerns an inherited curse and its resolution through love. As
one critic has noted, the idealistic protagonist Holgrave voices
Hawthorne's own democratic distrust of old aristocratic families:
"The truth is, that once in every half-century, at least, a
family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity,
and forget about its ancestors."
Hawthorne's last two novels were less successful. Both use modern
settings, which hamper the magic of romance. The Blithedale
Romance (1852) is interesting for its portrait of the
socialist,
utopian Brook Farm community. In the book, Hawthorne criticizes
egotistical, power-hungry social reformers whose deepest
instincts are not genuinely democratic. The Marble Faun
(1860),
though set in Rome, dwells on the Puritan themes of sin,
isolation, expiation, and salvation.
These themes, and his characteristic settings in Puritan colonial
New England, are trademarks of many of Hawthorne's best-known
shorter stories: "The Minister's Black Veil," "Young Goodman
Brown," and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." In the last of these, a
na��ve young man from the country comes to the city -- a common
route in urbanizing 19th-century America -- to seek help from his
powerful relative, whom he has never met. Robin has great
difficulty finding the major, and finally joins in a strange
night riot in which a man who seems to be a disgraced criminal is
comically and cruelly driven out of town. Robin laughs loudest of
all until he realizes that this "criminal" is none other than the
man he sought -- a representative of the British who has just
been
overthrown by a revolutionary American mob. The story confirms
the bond of sin and suffering shared by all humanity. It also
stresses the theme of the self-made man: Robin must learn, like
every democratic American, to prosper from his own hard work, not
from special favors from wealthy relatives.
"My Kinsman, Major Molineux" casts light on one of the most
striking elements in Hawthorne's fiction: the lack of functioning
families in his works. Although Cooper's Leather-Stocking
Tales
manage to introduce families into the least likely wilderness
places, Hawthorne's stories and novels repeatedly show broken,
cursed, or artificial families and the sufferings of the isolated
individual.
The ideology of revolution, too, may have played a part in
glorifying a sense of proud yet alienated freedom. The American
Revolution, from a psychohistorical viewpoint, parallels an
adolescent rebellion away from the parent-figure of England and
the larger family of the British Empire. Americans won their
independence and were then faced with the bewildering dilemma of
discovering their identity apart from old authorities. This
scenario was played out countless times on the frontier, to the
extent that, in fiction, isolation often seems the basic American
condition of life. Puritanism and its Protestant offshoots may
have further weakened the family by preaching that the
individual's first responsibility was to save his or her own
soul.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville's masterpiece, is the
epic
story of the whaling ship Pequod and its "ungodly,
god-like man,"
Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale Moby-Dick
leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a realistic
adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human
condition. Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for
the pursuit of knowledge. Realistic catalogues and descriptions
of whales and the whaling industry punctuate the book, but these
carry symbolic connotations. In chapter 15, "The Right Whale's
Head," the narrator says that the Right Whale is a Stoic and the
Sperm Whale is a Platonian, referring to two classical schools of
philosophy.
Although Melville's novel is philosophical, it is also tragic.
Despite his heroism, Ahab is doomed and perhaps damned in the
end. Nature, however beautiful, remains alien and potentially
deadly. In Moby-Dick, Melville challenges Emerson's optimistic
idea that humans can understand nature. Moby-Dick, the
great
white whale, is an inscrutable, cosmic existence that dominates
the novel, just as he obsesses Ahab. Facts about the whale and
whaling cannot explain Moby-Dick; on the contrary, the facts
themselves tend to become symbols, and every fact is obscurely
related in a cosmic web to every other fact. This idea of
correspondence (as Melville calls it in the "Sphinx" chapter)
does not, however, mean that humans can "read" truth in nature,
as it does in Emerson. Behind Melville's accumulation of facts is
a mystic vision -- but whether this vision is evil or good, human
or inhuman, is never explained.
The novel is modern in its tendency to be self-referential, or
reflexive. In other words, the novel often is about itself.
Melville frequently comments on mental processes such as writing,
reading, and understanding. One chapter, for instance, is an
exhaustive survey in which the narrator attempts a classification
but finally gives up, saying that nothing great can ever be
finished ("God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole
book is but a draught -- nay, but the draught of a draught. O
Time, Strength, Cash and Patience"). Melvinne's notion of the
literary text as an imperfect version or an abandoned draft is
quite contemporary.
Ahab insists on imaging a heroic, timeless world of absolutes in
which he can stand above his men. Unwisely, he demands a finished
text, an answer. But the novel shows that just as there are no
finished texts, there are no final answers except, perhaps,
death.
Certain literary references resonate throughout the novel. Ahab,
named for an Old Testament king, desires a total, Faustian, god-
like knowledge. Like Oedipus in Sophocles' play, who pays
tragically for wrongful knowledge, Ahab is struck blind before he
is wounded in the leg and finally killed. Moby-Dick ends
with the
word "orphan." Ishmael, the narrator, is an orphan-like wanderer.
The name Ishmael emanates from the Book of Genesis in the Old
Testament -- he was the son of Abraham and Hagar (servant to
Abraham's wife, Sarah). Ishmael and Hagar were cast into the
wilderness by Abraham.
Other examples exist. Rachel (one of the patriarch Jacob's wives)
is the name of the boat that rescues Ishmael at book's end.
Finally, the metaphysical whale reminds Jewish and Christian
readers of the biblical story of Jonah, who was tossed overboard
by fellow sailors who considered him an object of ill fortune.
Swallowed by a "big fish," according to the biblical text, he
lived for a time in its belly before being returned to dry land
through God's intervention. Seeking to flee from punishment, he
only brought more suffering upon himself.
Historical references also enrich the novel. The ship
Pequod is
named for an extinct New England Indian tribe; thus the name
suggests that the boat is doomed to destruction. Whaling was in
fact a major industry, especially in New England: It supplied oil
as an energy source, especially for lamps. Thus the whale does
literally "shed light" on the universe. Whaling was also
inherently expansionist and linked with the idea of manifest
destiny, since it required Americans to sail round the world in
search of whales (in fact, the present state of Hawaii came under
American domination because it was used as the major refueling
base for American whaling ships). The Pequod's crew
members
represent all races and various religions, suggesting the idea of
America as a universal state of mind as well as a melting pot.
Finally, Ahab embodies the tragic version of democratic American
individualism. He asserts his dignity as an individual and dares
to oppose the inexorable external forces of the universe.
The novel's epilogue tempers the tragic destruction of the ship.
Throughout, Melville stresses the importance of friendship and
the multicultural human community. After the ship sinks, Ishmael
is saved by the engraved coffin made by his close friend, the
heroic tattooed harpooner and Polynesian prince Queequeg. The
coffin's primitive, mythological designs incorporate the history
of the cosmos. Ishmael is rescued from death by an object of
death. From death life emerges, in the end.
Moby-Dick has been called a "natural epic" -- a
magnificent
dramatization of the human spirit set in primitive nature --
because of its hunter myth, its initiation theme, its Edenic
island symbolism, its positive treatment of pre-technological
peoples, and its quest for rebirth. In setting humanity alone in
nature, it is eminently American. The French writer and
politician Alexis de Tocqueville had predicted, in the 1835 work
Democracy in America, that this theme would arise in
America as a
result of its democracy:
Tocqueville reasons that, in a democracy, literature would dwell
on "the hidden depths of the immaterial nature of man" rather
than on mere appearances or superficial distinctions such as
class and status. Certainly both Moby-Dick and
Typee, like
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Walden, fit this
description.
They are celebrations of nature and pastoral subversions of
class-oriented, urban civilization.
Poe's short and tragic life was plagued with insecurity. Like so
many other major 19th-century American writers, Poe was orphaned
at an early age. Poe's strange marriage in 1835 to his first
cousin Virginia Clemm, who was not yet 14, has been interpreted
as an attempt to find the stable family life he lacked.
Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of
beauty, and his writing is often exotic. His stories and poems
are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats (Poe, like
many other southerners, cherished an aristocratic ideal). These
gloomy characters never seem to work or socialize; instead they
bury themselves in dark, moldering castles symbolically decorated
with bizarre rugs and draperies that hide the real world of sun,
windows, walls, and floors. The hidden rooms reveal ancient
libraries, strange art works, and eclectic oriental objects. The
aristocrats play musical instruments or read ancient books while
they brood on tragedies, often the deaths of loved ones. Themes
of death-in-life, especially being buried alive or returning like
a vampire from the grave, appear in many of his works, including
"The Premature Burial," "Ligeia," "The Cask of Amontillado," and
"The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe's twilight realm between
life and death and his gaudy, Gothic settings are not merely
decorative. They reflect the overcivilized yet deathly interior
of his characters disturbed psyches. They are symbolic
expressions of the unconscious, and thus are central to his art.
Poe's verse, like that of many Southerners, was very musical and
strictly metrical. His best-known poem, in his own lifetime and
today, is "The Raven" (1845). In this eerie poem, the haunted,
sleepless narrator, who has been reading and mourning the death
of his "lost Lenore" at midnight, is visited by a raven (a bird
that eats dead flesh, hence a symbol of death) who perches above
his door and ominously repeats the poem's famous refrain,
"nevermore." The poem ends in a frozen scene of death-in-life:
Poe's stories -- such as those cited above -- have been described
as tales of horror. Stories like "The Gold Bug" and "The
Purloined Letter" are more tales of ratiocination, or reasoning.
The horror tales prefigure works by such American authors of
horror fantasy as H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, while the
tales of ratiocination are harbingers of the detective fiction of
Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and John D.
MacDonald. There is a hint, too, of what was to follow as science
fiction. All of these stories reveal Poe's fascination with the
mind and the unsettling scientific knowledge that was radically
secularizing the 19th-century world view.
In every genre, Poe explores the psyche. Profound psychological
insights glint throughout the stories. "Who has not, a hundred
times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no
other reason than because he knows he should not," we read in
"The Black Cat." To explore the exotic and strange aspect of
psychological processes, Poe delved into accounts of madness and
extreme emotion. The painfully deliberate style and elaborate
explanation in the stories heighten the sense of the horrible by
making the events seem vivid and plausible.
Poe's combination of decadence and romantic primitivism appealed
enormously to Europeans, particularly to the French poets
Sté Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valé,
and Arthur
Rimbaud. But Poe is not un-American, despite his aristocratic
disgust with democracy, preference for the exotic, and themes of
dehumanization. On the contrary, he is almost a textbook example
of Tocqueville's prediction that American democracy would produce
works that lay bare the deepest, hidden parts of the psyche. Deep
anxiety and psychic insecurity seem to have occurred earlier in
America than in Europe, for Europeans at least had a firm,
complex social structure that gave them psychological security.
In America, there was no compensating security; it was every man
for himself. Poe accurately described the underside of the
American dream of the self-made man and showed the price of
materialism and excessive competition -- loneliness, alienation,
and images of death-in-life.
Poe's "decadence" also reflects the devaluation of symbols that
occurred in the 19th century -- the tendency to mix art objects
promiscuously from many eras and places, in the process stripping
them of their identity and reducing them to merely decorative
items in a collection. The resulting chaos of styles was
particularly noticeable in the United States, which often lacked
traditional styles of its own. The jumble reflects the loss of
coherent systems of thought as immigration, urbanization, and
industrialization uprooted families and traditional ways. In art,
this confusion of symbols fueled the grotesque, an idea that Poe
explicitly made his theme in his classic collection of stories,
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).
American women endured many
inequalities in the 19th century:
They were denied the vote, barred from professional schools and
most higher education, forbidden to speak in public and even
attend public conventions, and unable to own property. Despite
these obstacles, a strong women's network sprang up. Through
letters, personal friendships, formal meetings, women's
newspapers, and books, women furthered social change.
Intellectual women drew parallels between themselves and slaves.
They courageously demanded fundamental reforms, such as the
abolition of slavery and women's suffrage, despite social
ostracism and sometimes financial ruin. Their works were the
vanguard of intellectual expression of a larger women's literary
tradition that included the sentimental novel. Women's
sentimental novels, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle
Tom's
Cabin, were enormously popular. They appealed to the emotions
and
often dramatized contentious social issues, particularly those
touching the family and women's roles and responsibilities.
After her husband died, Cady Stanton deepened her analysis of
inequality between the sexes. Her book The Woman's Bible
(1895)
discerns a deep-seated anti-female bias in Judaeo-Christian
tradition. She lectured on such subjects as divorce, women's
rights, and religion until her death at 86, just after writing a
letter to President Theodore Roosevelt supporting the women's
vote. Her numerous works -- at first pseudonymous, but later
under her own name -- include three co-authored volumes of
History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1886) and a candid,
humorous
autobiography.
This humorous and irreverent orator has been compared to the
great blues singers. Harriet Beecher Stowe and many others found
wisdom in this visionary black woman, who could declare, "Lord,
Lord, I can love even de white folk!"
Reasons for the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin are obvious.
It
reflected the idea that slavery in the United States, the nation
that purportedly embodied democracy and equality for all, was an
injustice of colossal proportions.
Stowe herself was a perfect representative of old New England
Puritan stock. Her father, brother, and husband all were well-
known, learned Protestant clergymen and reformers. Stowe
conceived the idea of the novel -- in a vision of an old, ragged
slave being beaten -- as she participated in a church service.
Later, she said that the novel was inspired and "written by God."
Her motive was the religious passion to reform life by making it
more godly. The Romantic period had ushered in an era of feeling:
The virtues of family and love reigned supreme. Stowe's novel
attacked slavery precisely because it violated domestic values.
Uncle Tom, the slave and central character, is a true Christian
martyr who labors to convert his kind master, St. Clare, prays
for St. Clare's soul as he dies, and is killed defending slave
women. Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or
philosophical reasons but mainly because it divides families,
destroys normal parental love, and is inherently un-Christian.
The most touching scenes show an agonized slave mother unable to
help her screaming child and a father sold away from his family.
These were crimes against the sanctity of domestic love.
Stowe's novel was not originally intended as an attack on the
South; in fact, Stowe had visited the South, liked southerners,
and portrayed them kindly. Southern slaveowners are good masters
and treat Tom well. St. Clare personally abhors slavery and
intends to free all of his slaves. The evil master Simon Legree,
on the other hand, is a nrtherner and the villain. Ironically,
the novel was meant to reconcile the North and South, which were
drifting toward the Civil War a decade away. Ultimately, though,
the book was used by abolitionists and others as a polemic
against the South.
Terrified of being caught and sent back to slavery and
punishment, she spent almost seven years hidden in her master's
town, in the tiny dark attic of her grandmother's house. She was
sustained by glimpses of her beloved children seen through holes
that she drilled through the ceiling. She finally escaped to the
North, settling in Rochester, New York, where Frederick Douglass
was publishing the anti-slavery newspaper North Star and
near
which (in Seneca Falls) a women's rights convention had recently
met. There Jacobs became friends with Amy Post, a Quaker
feminist abolitionist, who encouraged her to write her
autobiography. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
published
under the pseudonym "Linda Brent" in 1861, was edited by Lydia
Child. It outspokenly condemned the sexual exploitation of black
slave women. Jacobs's book, like Douglass's, is part of the slave
narrative genre extending back to Olauda Equiano in colonial
times.
Like Jacobs, Wilson did not publish under her own name (Our
Nig
was ironic), and her work was overlooked until recently. The same
can be said of the work of most of the women writers of the era.
Noted African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. -- in his
role of spearheading the black fiction project -- reissued Our
Nig in 1983.
In 1845, he published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave (second version 1855, revised in
1892), the best and most popular of many "slave narratives."
Often dictated by illiterate blacks to white abolitionists and
used as propaganda, these slave narratives were well-known in the
years just before the Civil War. Douglass's narrative is vivid
and highly literate, and it gives unique insights into the
mentality of slavery and the agony that institution caused among
blacks.
The slave narrative was the first black literary prose genre in
the United States. It helped blacks in the difficult task of
establishing an African-American identity in white America, and
it has continued to exert an important influence on black
fictional techniques and themes throughout the 20th century. The
search for identity, anger against discrimination, and sense of
living an invisible, hunted, underground life unacknowledged by
the white majority have recurred in the works of such 20th-
century black American authors as Richard Wright, James Baldwin,
Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, a fifth-generation American of English
descent, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a wealthy seaport
north of Boston that specialized in East India trade. One of his
ancestors had been a judge in an earlier century, during trials
in Salem of women accused of being witches. Hawthorne used the
idea of a curse on the family of an evil judge in his novel
The
House of the Seven Gables.
Herman Melville, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a descendant of an
old, wealthy family that fell abruptly into poverty upon the
death of the father. Despite his patrician upbringing, proud
family traditions, and hard work, Melville found himself in
poverty with no college education. At 19 he went to sea. His
interest in sailors' lives grew naturally out of his own
experiences, and most of his early novels grew out of his
voyages. In these we see the young Melville's wide, democratic
experience and hatred of tyranny and injustice. His first book,
Typee, was based on his time spent among the supposedly
cannibalistic but hospitable tribe of the Taipis in the Marquesas
Islands of the South Pacific. The book praises the islanders and
their natural, harmonious life, and criticizes the Christian
missionaries, who Melville found less genuinely civilized than
the people they came to convert.
The destinies of mankind, man himself taken aloof from his
country and his age and standing in the presence of Nature and
God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare propensities and
inconceivable wretchedness, will become the chief, if not the
sole, theme of (American) poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe, a southerner, shares with Melville a darkly
metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, and
burlesque. He refined the short story genre and invented
detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of
science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today.
is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just
above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of
a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him
streaming throws his shadow on the
floor;
And my soul from out that shadow
that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted -- nevermore!
I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into bars, and
no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as
much and eat as much as a man -- when I could get it -- and
bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen
children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I
cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And
ain't I a woman?
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life
Among
the Lowly was the most popular American book of the 19th
century.
First published serially in the National Era magazine
(1851-
1852), it was an immediate success. Forty different publishers
printed it in England alone, and it was quickly translated into
20 languages, receiving the praise of such authors as Georges
Sand in France, Heinrich Heine in Germany, and Ivan Turgenev in
Russia. Its passionate appeal for an end to slavery in the United
States inflamed the debate that, within a decade, led to the U.S.
Civil War (1861-1865).
Born a slave in North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs was taught to read
and write by her mistress. On her mistress's death, Jacobs was
sold to a white master who tried to force her to have sexual
relations. She resisted him, finding another white lover by whom
she had two children, who went to live with her grandmother. "It
seems less degrading to give one's self than to submit to
compulsion," she candidly wrote. She escaped from her owner and
started a rumor that she had fled North.
Harriet Wilson was the first African-American to publish a novel
in the United States -- Our Nig: or, Sketches from the life of
a
Free Black, in a two-storey white house, North. showing that
Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There (1859). The novel
realistically dramatizes the marriage between a white woman and a
black man, and also depicts the difficult life of a black servant
in a wealthy Christian household. Formerly thought to be
autobiographical, it is now understood to be a work of fiction.
The most famous black American anti-lavery leader and orator of
the era, Frederick Douglass was born a slave on a Maryland
plantation. It was his good fortune to be sent to relatively
liberal Baltimore as a young man, where he learned to read and
write. Escaping to Massachusetts in 1838, at age 21, Douglass was
helped by abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison and began to
lecture for anti-lavery societies.
Outline of American Literature:
Contents
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