United States Literature and Art in the Nineteenth Century

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the United States was a provincial culture, still looking to Britain for values, standards, literature, and art, despite all the rapid improvements in communication- -for example, the great growth in the number of magazines and newspapers that occurred in the United States following independence from Great Britain. Ir a famous essay in the Edinburgh Review in 1820, Sydney Smith sarcastically inquired, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?”

Yet interest in the arts and the cultural institutions that sustain them was rapidly growing in America. To be sure, cultural institutions were difficult to create in the South, mainly because the population was so widely dispersed; and in the West, dominated in this era by pioneers, emphasis was on the practical rather than on the literary or artistic. But many eastern seaboard cities were actively building the cultural foundation that would nurture a distinctively American art and literature. During these years, Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743, boasted a distinguished roster of scientists, including Thomas Jefferson, concurrently its president and president of the United States. Culturally, Boston ran, a close second to Philadelphia, founding the Boston Athenaeum (1807), an impressive library and reading room containing‘ ‘works of learning and science in all languages, particularly such rare and expensive publications as are not generally to be found in this country,” The North American Review，which became the most important and long- lasting intellectual magazine in the country, was published in Boston. Devoted to keeping its readers in touch with European intellectual developments, it had a circulation of 3,000 in 1826, about the same as similar British journals.

Of the eastern cities, New York produced the first widely recognized American writers. In 1809 Washington Irving published America’s first great book of comic literature- -A History of New York- -a humorous account of life in New York both in colonial times and in Irving’s own day. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels (of which The Last of the Mohicans published in 1826, is the best known) achieved wide success in both America and Europe. In these novels, Cooper established the American experience of westward expansion as a serious and distinctive American theme.

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