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…
“Later I discovered that my creed was identical with the one of Howells and Garland and in this way I became involved in the beautiful war between those who say that art is man’s substitute for nature and we are most successful in art when we approach the nearest to nature and truth.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Despair
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., born 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead 7 October 1894 in Boston, was one of the most recognizably versatile figures in nineteenth-century American culture: physician, medical reformer, anatomist, professor, poet, novelist, essayist, conversational satirist, and public intellectual. He was often called the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” after his most celebrated prose…
“Most of the settlers of New England were too poor and too hard worked in fighting famine and the Indians to think much of their genealogical trees.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
