The New Nation

Use the timeline above to explore the new nation and its emerging literary independence. Clicking the link under a writer’s picture will show you more about that writer, and buttons will help you explore the era. You can also scroll down the page to read about all the writers in this time period.

What defines the American Voice?

Finding a unique American literary voice took quite some time. Early writers were often heavily influenced by religion or a lack thereof. Several movements arose throughout the period until the Civil War, when American voices finally began to shine.

Click the buttons below for more information about different aspects of the new nation as it found literary independence.

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Sojourner Truth

c.1797-1883

Orator, Memoirist

Sojourner Truth was born a slave in New York. In 1827, the state abolished slavery but her “owner” refused to comply. So, she escaped, saying later that, “I did not run away, I walked away by daylight.” Once free, she joined groups focusing on human rights and befriended noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who eventually published her life story.

Truth made her greatest impact on American society by speaking out against slavery and on behalf of women’s rights. Her insightful, powerful words and commanding presence–she was six feet tall–captivated audiences across the United States.

In 1863, Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe described a visit with Truth for the Atlantic Monthly magazine. “I do not recollect ever to have been conversant with any one who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence than this woman,” wrote Stowe.

“She seemed perfectly self-possessed and at her ease,” continued Stowe. “In fact, there was almost an unconcious superiority, not unmixed with a solemn twinkle of humor, in the odd, composed manner in which she looked down on me.”

Truth could not read or write, so she had to rely on others to transcribe her work. These scribes often changed Truth’s words, altering the meaning to fit their own agendas or prejudices.

For example, the most enduring version of Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech was published by white abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage. Although Truth was a New Yorker who originally spoke Dutch, Gage’s text is written in southern dialect, including the signature line: “Ain’t I a woman?”

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William Apess

1798-1839

Memoirist, Orator

William Apess’s memoir, A Son of the Forest (1829), describes his journey to reclaim his Pequot identity after being taken away from his family and forced to work as a servant for white families. The memoir–one of the first published works by a Native author–built upon the tradition of Native storytelling.

The memoir also details Apess’s decision to become an ordained Methodist minister. In Christianity, Apess found an argument for social justice that fueled his fight for Native American rights. In 1836, he courted controversy in a speech that hailed both George Washington and Wampanoag chief King Philip as fathers of the nation.

“Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it–which skin do you think would have the greatest?… I should look at all the skins, and I know that when I cast my eye upon that white skin, and if I saw those crimes written upon it, I should enter my protest against it immediately, and cleave to that which is more honorable.”

– William Apess, “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” (1833)

“Apess fought tirelessly for Native peoples’ rights to their land and peoplehood, with speeches and publications to white audiences and with peaceful protests that exposed Massachusetts ministers’ and legislators’ illegal use of Mashpee land. Apess created intertribal alliances by building on relationships among his own Pequot family and Haudenosaunee people, while in his writings, he brilliantly turned New England histories against themselves by incisively exposing their hypocrisy and errors in representing Native people as vanished or as savages.”

– Kelly Wisecup, Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University

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Harriet Ann Jacobs

1813-1897

Memoirist

Under the psuedonym Linda Brent, Harriet Jacobs recounts her incredible story, describing life under slavery and her harrowing escape after spending seven years hiding in a tiny attic crawlspace.

During the buildup to the Civil War, abolitionists published dozens of slave narratives. Jacobs’s was the only book-length one written by an African-American woman. She refused to sidestep the issue of sexual exploitation, detailing her relentless harassment by her owner. In doing so, she hoped to raise awareness of the plight of other enslaved African-American women, “suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse.”

“The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition. My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No indeed! They knew too well the consequences.”

– Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

This 1835 advertisement in The American Beacon, published in Norfolk, Virginia, offered a $100 reward for capturing Jacobs–a sizeable sum at the time.

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Frederick Douglass

1818-1895

Memoirist, Essayist, Orator

In 1845, Frederick Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which quickly became a best seller and a critical text in turning public opinion against slavery. Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland and escaped to freedom when he was 20. His Narrative is a powerful firsthand account of the brutalities of slavery and its dehumanizing impact.

Douglass was also a compelling orator. A firm believer that “right is of no sex; truth is of no color,” he spoke out on behalf of civil rights, immigrants’ rights, and women’s suffrage. He was one of the few men to attend the First Women’s Rights Convention (1848) in Seneca Falls, New York.

Douglass credited learning how to read as essential to finding his identity and deciding to escape from bondage:

“The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers.”

– Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

Douglass’s oratorical prowess made him an in-demand speaker. He gave hundreds of speeches and lectures in his lifetime, including his biting, passionate, and effective “Fifth of July” speech (1852). For enslaved Americans, he said, the Fourth of July was “a sham,” a reminder of America’s “revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy.”

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Herman Melville

1819-1891

Novelist, Poet

An adventurous youth, Herman Melville traveled to the South Pacific he described in his novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847); worked as a cabin boy like the protagonist of Redburn (1849); and sailed on a whaler like Ishmael, who narrates Moby-Dick (1851).

Melville enjoyed popular success early on, but by the time he published Moby-Dick, he had lost his audience. Nonetheless, he wrote some of his finest books in his last decades, including Billy Budd, Sailor, published posthumously in 1924. Though he was unappreciated during his lifetime, retroactive scholarship has identified Melville as among the greatest of America’s authors.

“No one knew it at the time, but Melville had created the literary equivalent of Queequeg’s coffin life buoy: a book that vanishes into the depths only to explode to the surface just in the nick of time. What Moby-Dick needed, it turned out, was space–the distance required for its themes and images to resonate unfettered by the turmoil and passions that had inspired them. Once free of its own historical moment, Moby-Dick became the seemingly timeless source of meaning that it is today.”

– Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick? (2011)

Melville greatly admired Nathaniel Hawthorne. In a review of Hawthorne’s collection Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), Melville wrote, “I have just returned from the hay mow, charged more and more with love and admiration of Hawthorne. For I have just been gleaning through the Mosses, picking up so many things here and there that had previously escaped me.”

Melville dedicated his great novel Moby-Dick to Hawthorne, “in token of my admiration for his genius.”

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Walt Whitman

1819-1892

Poet

Walt Whitman grew up in working-class New York City. He was largely self-taught, having left school at age 12. He worked as a newspaper journalist in and around New York and, for a short time, in New Orleans, developing a lifelong love for an expanding and ever-evolving America.

In 1855, Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. His poems celebrated America, freedom, and individualism. His unconventional free verse, without rhyme or meter, shocked many readers but others found Whitman’s style and voice distinctly American and democratic. He continued to revise Leaves until the end of his life, often adding entire new sequences of poems, such as “Drum-Taps,” which chronicled his complex response to the Civil War.

Note how 1950s Beat poet Allen Ginsberg emulates Whitman’s free-verse style and long lines in this tribute poem:

“What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the side streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!”

– Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California” (1955)

“Whitman’s poetry taught Americans how to begin to think and speak democratically, in a freer and looser idiom, in a more conversational and less formal tone, in an absorptive and indiscriminate way. He achieved an uncanny combination of oratory, journalism, and the Bible-haranguing, mundane, and prophetic-all in the service of identifying a a new American democratic attitude, an accepting voice that would catalogue the diversity of the country and manage to hold it all in a vast, single, unified identity.”

– Ed Folsom, Roy J. Carver Professor of English, University of Iowa; Co-Director, Walt Whitman Archive

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Emily Dickinson

1830-1886

Poet

Emily Dickinson is one of the wonderful mysteries of American literature. She rarely left the house or ventured from her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. Yet she maintained close friendships and carefully followed social issues of the day. Upon her death, her sister discovered 40 bound volumes filled with 1,800 poems.

Dickinson wrote about love, faith, mortality, nature’s sparse beauty, and the virtues of domestic life. Her work is breathtakingly original. Her unusual syntax and punctuation shattered all the rules of poetry. Many writers consider Dickinson and Whitman to have created the first uniquely American poetry.

Preserved leaves and flowers on a page from Emily DIckinson's herbarium catalog

View more pages here

As a young student, Dickinson compiled a book of 400 pressed flowers, each identified by name. As an adult, she was a passionate gardener who carefully tended a beautiful greenhouse and garden at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Dickinson’s poetry reflects her love of botany. She references plants in her poems nearly 600 times.

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Louisa May Alcott

1838-1888

Poet, Novelist

Daughter of Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott and social worker Abigail May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott grew up surrounded by writers and thinkers. She began her own career as a writer while still in her teens, crafting plays, thrillers, poetry, and short stories, as well as Hospital Sketches (1863), an account of her time as a Civil War nurse.

In 1868, Alcott transformed the field of children’s literature with Little Women (1868). Based on Alcott’s own upbringing, the novel painted a compelling portrait of family life. Her complex characters–particularly independent Jo–were refreshingly real and relatable.

Little Women has entranced young readers for generations, many identifying with the character of Jo. Fans include Hillary Clinton, Patti Smith, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Sontag, Gloria Steinem, Gertrude Stein, Ann Petry, and Adrienne Rich.

The influence has extended beyond U.S. borders. French writer Simone de Beauvoir “identified passionately with Jo, the intellectual.” More recently, J. K. (“Jo”) Rowling, Scottish author of the Harry Potter series, said, “It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a bad temper and burning ambition to be a writer.”

“Alcott fashioned American children’s literature’s first strong, pert, and unrepentantly self-reliant teen heroine, and cast Jo March as the living heart of the genre’s first enduring family story. In Little Women, old-fashioned moralizing takes a back seat as never before to zestful portraiture and a nuanced reckoning of the highs and lows of growing up outspoken, smart, and female in America.”

– Leonard S. Marcus, Children’s Book Historian, Writer, Critic

Colonial Visions & Revolution (1492-1830)

Many Voices (1877-1917)

What defines the American Voice?

Jump to Featured Writers:

Sojourner Truth

Jump to Featured Writers:

William Apess

Jump to Featured Writers:

Harriet Ann Jacobs

Jump to Featured Writers:

Frederick Douglass

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Herman Melville

Jump to Featured Writers:

Walt Whitman

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Emily Dickinson

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Louisa May Alcott

Abolitionism

Inventing America

Transcendentalism

Rise of Women’s Rights