Explores the social, cultural, and historical contexts of American literature in the first half of the 19th century, when social reform movements, international upheavals, and a rapidly expanding frontier combined to shape the literary identity of the new United States. Authors discussed include Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and many others.