American Literature of the 19th Century
I suppose my love of literature in general began specifically with the American literature of the Nineteenth Century. Elementary school encounters with Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe gave a sense of a whole story, a wide and vivid painting of a setting and characters and events. Short stories were taught throughout public school, and the short story was mastered by American writers in the Nineteenth Century. so the best was offered in the big reader anthologies of fifty years ago. I acquired a complete set of Nathaniel Hawthorne and read every volume, including the notebooks. Later I delighted in discovering the “off-canon” writers, particularly Bret Harte and Harriet Beecher Stowe. This page of my usual offerings in the store is not comprehensive, but I am working toward that. I hope it inspires returns to favorites, new discoveries, and rounding out earlier reading.
Oldtown Folks
Oldtown Folks
Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, wrote this 1869 novel with the intent of describing a New England village's life and character in the years after the Revolutionary War, before the advent of industrialization. Said Stowe, in the voice of the novel's narrator Horace Holyoke, "I would endeavor to show you New England in its seed-bed, before the hot suns of modern progress had developed its sprouting germs into the great trees of today." She based some of the book on the childhood memories of her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, and the residents of his birthplace, Natick, Massachusetts.