Between the years 1850 and 1855 there appeared, in rapid succession, five American books now universally recognised as classics: The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Walden and Leaves of Grass. This study seeks to clarify that extraordinary half-decade in the rise of American literature. In successive chapters Professor Lease analyses the British connections of ten American writers, from Washington Irving to Walt Whitman. He considers their struggle for cultural independence through their engagement with, reaction to and gradual acceptance by the established English world of...

Although E.A. Poe had recognized the genius of John Neal (1793-1876) and although H.L. Mencken believed that Neal might have been the most important American literary critic of his time, his contribution to American literature has been overshadowed by the performances of those authors he blazed trails for - Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain -. The first comprehensive Neal anthology reveals the dynamism by which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the USA started with their emancipation from the European literary tradition.