Major Features of the Transcendentalist Period
1. Everything in the world (especially human beings) is a reflection of the Oversoul or Universal Soul (a spiritual essence in the universe that all souls participate in).
2. Individuals use their intuition to understand God's spirit (especially revealed in Nature and their own individual soul).
3. Self-reliance over external authority and blind conformity to tradition.
Major Authors of the Transcendentalist Period
Lousia May Alcott "Little Women"
Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"
Edwin Robinson "Richard Cory"
Willaim Cullen Bryant "Thanatopsis"
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier Fireside Poets
Major Events of the Transcendentalist Period
Period runs from 1840-1855
End of Western Expansion
1846-48 Mexican War
1849 California Gold Rush
Emily Dickinson 1830-1886
Emily Dickinson sexpotting it up thanks to the Emily Dickinson Museum site.
Poets.org provides these words: "By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world, but actively maintained many correspondences and read widely. She spent a great deal of this time with her family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother, Austin, who attended law school and became an attorney, lived next door with his wife, Susan Gilbert. Dickinson’s younger sister, Lavinia, also lived at home for her entire life in similar isolation. Lavinia and Austin were not only family, but intellectual companions for Dickinson during her lifetime. / Dickinson’s poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity."
Henry Russell
Henry Russell was a popular baritone singer, composer, and pianist, born in in Sheernes, England on 24 December 1812 and died in London, England on 8 December 1900. His mother's name was Sarah Levin born in Konigsberg, Russia. He studied composition with Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868), Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini (1801-1835) and Dominico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (1797-1848), and singing with Michael William Balfe (1808-1870). During 1833-1841 he was an organist at the 1st Presbyterian Church of Rochester, NY. During 1837-1841, he toured, as a piano accompanist, for the singer William Vincent Wallace (1812-1860). He returned to England circa 1845.
Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862
The Walden Woods Project says this about Thoreau: "Henry David Thoreau lived in the mid-nineteenth century during turbulent times in America. He said he was born "in the nick of time" in Concord, Massachusetts, during the flowering of America when the transcendental movement was taking root and when the anti-slavery movement was rapidly gaining momentum. / Thoreau's contemporaries and neighbors were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was at once philosopher and naturalist; abolitionist and teacher; scientist and moralist; poet and surveyor; pencil maker and author. It is perhaps the many "lives" of Thoreau, both individually and collectively, that beckon such a diversity of people to his writings."
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882
The American Trascendentalism Web says this about Waldo: "Waldo Emerson is truly the center of the American transcendental movement, setting out most of its ideas and values in a little book, Nature, published in 1836, that represented at least ten years of intense study in philosophy, religion, and literature, and in his First Series of essays. / Born in 1803 to a conservative Unitarian minister, from a long line of ministers, and a quietly devout mother, Waldo--who dropped the "Ralph" in college--was a middle son of whom relatively little was expected. His father died when he was eight, the first of many premature deaths which would shape his life--all three brothers, his first wife at 20, and his older son at 5. Perhaps the most powerful personal influence on him for years was his intellectual, eccentric, and death-obsessed Puritanical aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Yet Emerson often confessed to an innate optimism, even occasional 'silliness.'"
Walt Whitman 1819-1892
Poets.org introduces Whitman: Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman was the second son of Walter Whitman, a housebuilder, and Louisa Van Velsor. The family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Brooklyn and Long Island in the 1820s and 1830s. / At the age of twelve, Whitman began to learn the printer’s trade, and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. / In 1855, Whitman took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. Whitman released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-three poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by Whitman in response. During his lifetime, Whitman continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book. Noted Whitman scholar, M. Jimmie Killingsworth writes that “the ‘merge,' as Whitman conceived it, is the tendency of the individual self to overcome moral, psychological, and political boundaries. Thematically and poetically, the notion dominates the three major poems of 1855: ‘I Sing the Body Electric,' ‘The Sleepers,' and ‘Song of Myself,' all of which were ‘merged’ in the first edition under the single title Leaves of Grass but were demarcated by clear breaks in the text and the repetition of the title.” / Along with Emily Dickinson, he is considered one of America’s most important poets.
Major Features of the Realist Period
1. Feelings of disillusionment are the main.
2. Wrote about common people and common subjects in a world that was more city than rural and more factory than farm.
3. Represented everyday life as realistically as possible in a reaction to Romanticism.
4. Sought to explain social and psychological behaviors.
5. Wrote mainly in short stories and novels (though novels dominate).
6. Naturalism is a subgenre
a. Like Realism only darker view of the world
b. Universe is unpredictable and free will is an illusion
c. Characters' lives shaped by forces beyond their control
Major Authors of the Realist Period
Stephen Crane "Red Badge of Courage"
Kate Chopin "The Awakening"
Ambrose Pierce "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Major Events of the Realist Period
Period runs from about 1865-1915
1855-1865 Civil War
Ongoing? Reconstruction
Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-1896
History.com writes this of Stowe's life and work: In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, professor of biblical literature at Lane. The death of a son in 1849 led her away from her father’s Calvinism and gave supremacy in her views to the redemptive spirit of Christian love. By 1850, the family had moved to Maine, where, in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of that year, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), her most celebrated work. Sentimental and realistic by turns, the novel explored the cruelties of chattel slavery in the Upper and Lower South and exposed the moral ironies in the legal, religious, and social arguments of white apologists.
The immense impact of the novel (it sold 300,000 copies in its first year) was unexpected. Antislavery fiction had never sold well; Stowe was not an established writer, and few would have expected a woman to gain a popular hearing on the great political question of the day. Some female abolitionists had shocked decorum in the 1840s by speaking at public gatherings, but they were widely resented. The success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin went far toward legitimizing, if not indeed creating, a role for women in public affairs.
Mark Twain 1835-1910
The Official Site of Mark Twain offers this: "On Nov. 30, 1835, the small town of Florida, Mo. witnessed the birth of its most famous son. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was welcomed into the world as the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens. Little did John and Jane know, their son Samuel would one day be known as Mark Twain - America's most famous literary icon.
Mark Twain passed away on April 21, 1910, but has a following still today. His childhood home is open to the public as a museum in Hannibal, and Calavaras County in California holds the Calavaras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee every third weekend in May. Walking tours are given in New York City of places Twain visited near his birthday every year.
Jack Norworth 1879-1959
There's more to the song than what Harry Carey made even more popular at Cub games during the seventh inning stretch. The melody is essentially the same, but much like "Jingle Bells," the lyrics have been significantly pared down.
Jack London 1876-1916
Jack London Historic State Park introduces London this way: "Jack London was born on January 12, 1876. By age 30 London was internationally famous for his books Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea Wolf (1904) and other literary and journalistic accomplishments. Though he wrote passionately about the great questions of life and death and the struggle to survive with dignity and integrity, he also sought peace and quiet inspiration. His stories of high adventure were based on his own experiences at sea, in the Yukon Territory, and in the fields and factories of California. His writings appealed to millions worldwide."
Kate Chopin 1850-1904
The Kate Chopin International Society introduces her this way: Her short stories were well received in her own time and were published by some of America’s most prestigious magazines—Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Young People, Youth’s Companion, and the Century. A few stories were syndicated by the American Press Association. Her stories appeared also in her two published collections, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), both of which received good reviews from critics across the country. About a third of her stories are children’s stories—those published in or submitted to children’s magazines or those similar in subject or theme to those that were. By the late 1890s Kate Chopin was well known among American readers of magazine fiction.
Her early novel At Fault (1890) had not been much noticed by the public, but The Awakening (1899) was widely condemned. Critics called it morbid, vulgar, and disagreeable. Willa Cather, who would become a well known twentieth-century American author, labeled it trite and sordid.
Scott Joplin 1868-1917
Love the location of his borth at biography.com: Born in the late 1860s somewhere along the border between Texas and Arkansas, Scott Joplin took up the piano as a child and eventually became a travelling musician as a teen. He immersed himself in the emerging musical form known as ragtime and became the genre’s foremost composer with tunes like "The Entertainer," "Solace" and "The Maple Leaf Rag," which is the biggest-selling ragtime song in history. Joplin also penned the operas Guest of Honor and Treemonisha. He died in New York City on April 1, 1917.
Major Features of the Modernist Period
1. Disillusionment Part II. A loss of faith in The American Dream really begins
2. Emphasized more experimentation in style and form over the traditional
3. Much more interest in the workings of the human mind (Stream of consciousness, for example)
4. No longer a belief in absolute truths and a questioning of tradition.
Major Events of the Modernist Period
1914-1919 World War I
1929 The Great Depression
1939-1945 World War II
Major Authors of the Modernist Period
If before I felt bad about excluding folks, the problem is even worse in this era. And too many ThugNotes to place. Go look for entertainment value only.
F. Scott Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby"
John Steinback "Of Mice and Men"
T.S. Eliot "The Wasteland"
Eudora Welty "A Worn Path"
e.e. Cummings "in Just-"
Eugene O'Neill "The Iceman Cometh"
Tennessee Williams "A Streetcar Named Desire"
Arthur Miller "Death of a Salesman"
Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961
The Hemingway-Pfieffer Museum says this about Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Dr. and Mrs. Clarence Hemingway. After high school, the young Hemingway shunned college for a series of adventures that included serving as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, an ambulance driver for the Red Cross on the Italian front in World War I, a sparring partner for boxers in Chicago, and a writer for the Toronto Star.During his stay in Chicago, he married Hadley Richardson, formerly of St. Louis, and the pair moved to Paris where he began honing his writing skills. After six years of marriage and one son, John (known as Jack or Bumby), Hemingway divorced Hadley in 1927 to marry Pauline Pfeiffer.His marriage to Pauline began to crumble after he met Martha Gellhorn, also a writer and war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway divorced Pauline in 1940 and married Martha. That marriage failed also, and in 1946 he married Mary Welsh, another journalist, who remained at his side until his death.
After his divorce from Pauline, Hemingway moved from their home in Key West to Cuba, maintaining a home just outside Havana—Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm). When the Cuban Revolution forced his departure in 1960, Hemingway and his wife, Mary, relocated to Ketchum, Idaho.
The Old Man and the Sea, one of Hemingway’s best known stories, was published in 1952, earning him both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize. After achieving this great literary pinnacle, however, his health continued to deteriorate. He committed suicide in his Ketchum, Idaho home on July 2, 1961.
These are for your enjoyment only, not on the exams
Robert Frost 1874-1963
Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. “Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet,” writes James M. Cox, “it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry.” In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of 19th-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many 19th-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his 20th-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O’Connor point out in Poems for Study, “Frost’s poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century.” Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.
Frank Henry Loesser 1910-1969
FRANK LOESSER has been called the most versatile of all Broadway composers. His five Broadway musicals, each a unique contribution to the art of the American musical theater, were as different from each other as they were from the theater of their day: Where's Charley?, Guys And Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, Greenwillow and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. Long before he wrote Where's Charley?, he was already known to America from the dozens of songs that had become enormous popular hits from his Hollywood career. He had supplied lyrics to the music of such greats as Jule Styne, Hoagy Carmichael, Burton Lane and Arthur Schwartz, among others, penning such standards as "On a Slow Boat to China," "Two Sleepy People," "Heart and Soul," "I Don't Want to Walk Without You," "Spring Will Be a Little Late this Year," "(See What) The Boys in the Backroom (Will Have)," "They're Either Too Young or Too Old" and his 1948 Academy Award winner, "Baby, It's Cold Outside."
William Faulkner 1897-1962
The Mississippi Witer's Page says this about Faulkner: "The man himself never stood taller than five feet, six inches tall, but in the realm of American literature, William Faulkner is a giant. More than simply a renowned Mississippi writer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story writer is acclaimed throughout the world as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, one who transformed his “postage stamp” of native soil into an apocryphal setting in which he explored, articulated, and challenged “the old verities and truths of the heart.” During what is generally considered his period of greatest artistic achievement, from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to Go Down, Moses in 1942, Faulkner accomplished in a little over a decade more artistically than most writers accomplish over a lifetime of writing. It is one of the more remarkable feats of American literature, how a young man who never graduated from high school, never received a college degree, living in a small town in the poorest state in the nation, all the while balancing a growing family of dependents and impending financial ruin, could during the Great Depression write a series of novels all set in the same small Southern county — novels that include As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and above all, Absalom, Absalom! — that would one day be recognized as among the greatest novels ever written by an American. "
Carl Sandburg 1878-1967
"Trying to write briefly about Carl Sandburg," said a friend of the poet, "is like trying to picture the Grand Canyon in one black and white snapshot." His range of interests was enumerated by his close friend, Harry Golden, who, in his study of the poet, called Sandburg "the one American writer who distinguished himself in five fields—poetry, history, biography, fiction, and music."