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.
The Blithedale Romance
The Blithedale Romance
Abjuring the city for a pastoral life, a group of utopians set out to reform a dissipated America. But the group is a powerful mix of competing ambitions and its idealism finds little satisfaction in farmwork. Instead, of changing the world, the members of the Blithedale community individually pursue egotistical paths that ultimately lead to tragedy. Hawthorne's tale both mourns and satirizes a rural idyll not unlike that of nineteenth-century America at large.