1800 – 1860 American Romanticism values feelings over intuition values the power of the imagination seeks the beauty of unspoiled nature values youthful innocence values individual freedom values the lessons of the past finds beauty in exotic locales, the supernatural, and in the imagination.
1849 Edgar Allan Poe on 3 October 1849 he was found inebriated and “rather the worse for wear”; he died in the Washington College Hospital four days later. Rufus Griswold, his literary executor, wrote an infamously hostile obituary, from which Poe’s reputation has never fully recovered. Certainly, Poe had his share of mortal frailties, but he also created immortal works of literature
1826 “The Last of Mohicans” When Fenimore Cooper returned to the United States, he began writing his famous Leather-Stocking novels: “The Pioneers” (1823); “The Last of Mohicans” (1826); “The Pathfinder” (1840) and some others. These are his best works; they are all about American Indians. The main character in all these novels is Leather Stocking, as he was called by the Indians. He was a white man, a hunter, named Natty Bumppo. He was just and kind, and though he was an ordinary man with very little education, he knew much about forest life. He also said that all men, white, black, yellow or red, were brothers. He was against civilization because he thought it spoilt nature and people.
1883 Theodore Dreiser based his first novel on the life of his sister Emma. In 1883 she ran away to Toronto, Canada with a married man who had stolen money from his employer. At the time of its first publication, the novel caused a minor scandal and Dreiser had difficulty finding a publisher for it. This was due to the blurred division line between good and bad in the plot and the fact that, at the end, Carrie is rewarded rather than punished for her immoral life.
July 10, 1861 Frances Appleton died. Devastated by her death, Henry Longfellow never fully recovered. He worried he would go insane and begged "not to be sent to an asylum" and noted that he was "inwardly bleeding to death". He expressed his grief in the sonnet "The Cross of Snow" (1879), which he wrote eighteen years later to commemorate her death.