In the pantheon of nineteenth-century American letters, John Townsend Trowbridge occupies a curious position—neither forgotten nor fully remembered, a writer whose prolific output and genuine popularity during his lifetime have faded into the scholarly margins, yet whose contribution to American literature, particularly children's and young adult fiction, deserves far greater recognition than it typically receives. B…
“Every year confirms my earliest impression, that no book has approached the power and greatness of this book, since the Lear and Hamlet of Shakespeare.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Children's Verse, Folk & Ballad Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Anger
Stephen Crane, born 1 November 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, and dead of tuberculosis on 5 June 1900 in Badenweiler, Germany, lived only twenty-eight years, yet his work altered the direction of American fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is commonly placed among the major writers of literary naturalism, beside such figures as Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, but the label only partly contains him. Crane was at once…
“You know when I left you I renounced the clever school in literature. It seemed to me that there must be something more in life than to sit and cudgel one’s brains for clever and witty expedients. So I developed all alone a little creed of art which I thought a good one.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Despair
