Was Emerson the True Father of American Literature?
The 1850s have been called the American Renaissance, the decade when distinctive new voices emerged in prose and poetry. The great works were remarkably concentrated: from The Scarlet Letter (1850) to Moby-Dick (1851), to Walden (1854), to Leaves of Grass (1855). In her seminal 1846 essay on American literature in the New York Tribune, Margaret Fuller had called…
