Edgar Allan Poe

“Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

That line from Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Raven” is one of the most famous in American poetry.  Poe is also well known for his short stories, many of them tales of terror and suspense.  He has been called the father of modern mystery and horror stories.

Poe led a short and tragic life.   Orphaned before he was three, he was raised in Virginia by foster parents.  His failure to complete his education and his self-destructive behavior infuriated his foster father, who disowned him.  Penniless, Poe eaked out a meager living as a writer and magazine editor.   In 1836, he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm.  He was devoted to her, but their life was a constant struggle for survivial. 

In the 1840s, Poe won recognition for poems such as “The Raven,” the story of a lost love, and for chilling stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

“The Murders in the rue Morgue” was the forerunner of later detective tales.  But despite his growing reputation, Poe earned little.  After his wrife died in 1847, he was plagued by depression and ill health.  He died when only 40 years old. 

To earn money, Poe editied a gossip column for a woman’s magazine in 1846.

Amy Tan

In Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, a group of Chinese-American women meets regularly to play mah-jongg, a Chinese game played with small ivory tiles. The women all came to the U.S. from China years earlier, and have kept their Chinese traditions. Their old-fashioned ways embarrass the book’s heroine, the grown daughter of one of the women. Above all, she wants to be American. But as the women tell their touching and often tragic stories of their lives, the daughter begins to understand and appreciate her Chinese heritage.

Amy Tan’s Chinese given name, An-mei, means “blessing from America.”

The story is close to Tan’s own experience. Her parents come to California from China, and she grew up with many of the same conflicts faced by the young heroine of the book. Tan’s parents wanted her to have a successful live in American, but they hoped she would think of herself as Chinese. As a girl, Tan wanted only to blend into American society, but when she began to write stories in the mid-1980s, she brought her two worlds together. Her personal experiences enabled her to write movingly about the relationships between immigrant parents of their children.

The Joy Luck Club, Tan’s first novel, was a surprise best-seller in 1989 and later a successful movie. Her second book, The Kitchen God’s Wife, was also successful. And in 1995 she was back on the best-seller list with The Hundred Secret Senses, a novel about a Chinese-American woman and her Chinese half sister.

1682

The year 1682 was an important one for two adventurous Europeans – French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and William Penn, an English Quaker.

La Salle had set out from Canada in 1689, searching for a great river described by the Indians. In 1682-1682, he traveled down the full length of the Mississippi. When he reached the Gulf of Mexico in April, 1682, he claimed all the land that the Mississippi flowed through for France. La Salle named the vast territory Louisiana, in honor of his king, Louis XIV.

As a Quaker, William Penn was persecuted and jailed in England for his religious beliefs. In 1681, he received a grant of land in America from the English king in settlement of a debt owed to his father. Penn immediately sent agents to the New World to begin building a settlement. The next year, he went to America himself and issued the colony’s frame of government. Penn’s guarantee of religious freedom and his easy terms for buying land attracted many settlers to his colony – “Penn’s Woods,” or Pennsylvania.

Also in 1682 – One of America’s first best-sellers was published in 1682. The Sovereignty and Goodness of God was Mary Rowlandson’s account of her capture by Wampanoag Indians in Massachusetts in 1676.

The painting with this post is titled LaSalle at the Mouth of the Mississippi. The artist is George Catlin. It was painted sometime in the 1840s.

Herman Melville

A whaling ship scours the seas for a mysterious white whale. Its Captain Ahab is obsessed with hunting the creature down. At last, Ahab himself raises the cry, “There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” Those words bring readers to the gripping climax of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale , one of the greatest American novels.

Melville knew the sea well. As a young man, he sailed on a whaling ship to the South Pacific, determined to “sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.,” His first books, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and Omoo, were successful. Typee is based on Melville’s real experiences with cannibals on an island in the South Pacific. But when Moby-Dick was published in 1851, it sold poorly and received bad reviews. Melville continued to write, publishing several novels and many short stories. But he had to work as a customs inspector in New York City to earn a living.

Moby-Dick is unlike any other novel. It is an exciting adventure tale, the story of Ahab’s quest for the white whale. But it also offers long passages about whales and the whaling industry. On a deeper level, the book explores such themes as the conflicts between man and nature and between good and evil.

The novel’s greatness was not widely recognized until many years after Melville’s death.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott wrote almost 300 books, stories, and poems, but she is best known for the novel Little Women. This children’s classic is about four teenage sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—and their family life in a New England village during the time of the American Civil War. Alcott herself was one of four sisters, and the story is largely based on her own life.

The Alcott family moved to Concord, Massachusetts, when Louisa May Alcott was eight years old. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a teacher, but he had problems supporting his family. Among his friends were two great writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They helped Alcott develop her writing ability. She started writing when she was 19, to earn money for the family.

Alcott’s first book, Flower Fables, was published in 1854. But her first success came in 1863 with Hospital Sketches, which was based on her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War. Little Women, published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, was an immediate success. Her publisher originally decided not to publish Little Women, but his children read the manuscript, loved it, and talked him into it. She later wrote several sequels about the March family, including Little Men and Jo’s Boys.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel about the evils of slavery that stirred the conscience of Americans and helped to bring about the Civil War.

Stowe’s father and six of her brothers were ministers. All of them were strongly opposed to slavery. After the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1832, she met many other abolitionists. Visiting plantations in nearby Kentucky, she saw slavery in operation, and her hatred of the institution deepened.

Harriet Beecher had married Professor Calvin Stowe in 1832. They moved to Maine in 1850, the same year that the Fugitive Slave Act was passed. The law made it easier for runaway slaves to be returned to the South. Stowe was so angry about this, she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

Published in 1852, it is the story of a slave named Uncle Tom who dies after he is beaten by a plantation owner named Simon Legree. The book’s powerful portrayal of the evils of slavery shocked its readers. Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year and about two million copies before the start of the Civl War. When President Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War, he said to her, “So this is the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war.”

Civil War, Literature, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1832, 1850, Slavery, 1852, Important People

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote. “It’s the best book we’ve had.” Many critics share this high opinion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yet some people have called the book crude and racist, and it has been banned by some libraries.

Set in the South before the Civil War, the book tells the story of young Huck Finn, who runs aways from his abusive father. Huck teams up with a runaway slave named Jim, and the two head down the Mississippi River on a raft. Along the way, they meet feuding families, crooks, and Huck’s friend from an earlier Twain book, Tom Sawyer.

When Jim is captured by slave catchers, Huck and Tom rescue him. At the end of the book, Jim learns that he has been freed by his owner, and the self-reliant Huck heads west to avoid being adopted and “civilized.”

It is a humorous tale, yet the author explores such key themes in American history as slavery, independence, and equality. Moreover, he captures with amazing accuracy the speech of ordinary people of the time. Twain, however, jokingly threatened to prosecute, banish, or shoot anyone who found a motive, moral, or plot in Huckleberry Finn. He wanted people to enjoy reading it. And for more than 110 years, they have.

Like his character, Huck Finn, Mark Twain grew up in a small Missouri town on the Mississippi River.

Stephen King

Stephen King calls his horror stories “fearsome,” but they are more than fearsome. They’re hair-raising. They’re bloodcurdling. They’re spine-chilling. And they have brought hours of terrified pleasure to millions.

A native of Maine, King spent much of his childhood listening to horror stories on the radio, reading scary comic books and paperbooks, and watching science-fiction and monster movies. He began writing horror stories of his own, but none were accepted for publication, Finally, when he was 23, he sold two stories to a mystery magazine for $35 each.

King began working on his first novel while teaching English at a private school. Discouraged by a string of rejections from publishers, he tossed the manuscript into the trash. But his wife retrieved it and urged him to complete the novel. That book was Carrie, which in 1974 became his first blockbuster success. Carrie tells the story of a lonely high-school girl whose telekinetic powers enable her to take grisly revenge on her tormentors. The book has sold more than four million copies. Since then, King has written over 30 best-sellers that have made him one of the most popular writers in the history of American publishing.

When he is working on a new book, King writes about 1,500 words a day to the accompaniment of rock music.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson called her poetry “my letter to the world.” But only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime. Not until after her death did the world take notice of the odd, brilliant woman who was one of America’s greatest poets.

Dickinson was born and lived her entire life in her father’s red brick house in Amherst, Massachusetts. She had a normal childhood, but as an adult she led a largely solitary life. Because Emily Dickinson was rarely seen around Amherst after she reached adulthood, the townspeople called her “The Myth.” She never married. She rarely left her home and she spent many hours alone, writing poetry. Her poems expressed her deepest emotions. Many of them were about nature, death, and God.

In all, Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems. But she never tried to have them published. A few were submitted to newspapers by admirers without her consent.

She hid most of her poems in a bureau in her bedroom. After her death in 1886, her sister and a friend arranged for a volume of her poems to be published. One reviewer attacked them as “barbaric,” because they did not have simple positive messages or tradional forms. But the book became a great success with the American public, which recognized the genius of Emily Dickinson’s “letter to the world.”