During the years covered in this volume, Bryant traveled more often and widely than at any comparable period during his life. The visits to Great Britain and Europe, a tour of the Near East and the Holy Land, and excursions in Cuba, Spain, and North Africa, as well as two trips to Illinois, he described in frequent letters to the Evening Post. Reprinted widely, and later published in two volumes, these met much critical acclaim, one notice praising the "quiet charm of these letters, written mostly from out-of-the-way places, giving charming pictures of nature and people, with the most delicate choice of words, and yet in the perfect simplicity of the true epistolary style." His absence during nearly one-fifth of this nine-year period reflected the growing prosperity of Bryant's newspaper, and his confidence in his editorial partner John Bigelow and correspondents such as William S. Thayer, as well as in the financial acumen of his business partner Isaac Henderson. These were crucial years in domestic politics, however, and Bryant's guidance of Evening Post policies was evident in editorials treating major issues such as the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the rise of the Republican Party, and the Dred Scott Decision, as well as in his correspondence with such statesmen as Salmon P. Chase, Hamilton Fish, William L. Marcy, Edwin D. Morgan, and Charles Sumner. His travel letters and journalistic writings reflected as well his acute interest in a Europe in turmoil. In France and Germany he saw the struggles between revolution and repression; in Spain he talked with journalists, parliamentary leaders, and the future president of the first Spanish republic; in New York he greeted Louis Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi. Bryant's close association with the arts continued. He sat for portraits to a dozen painters, among them Henry P. Gray, Daniel Huntington, Asher Durand, Charles L. Elliott, and Samuel Laurence. The landscapists continued to be inspired by his poetic themes. Sculptor Horatio Greenough asked of Bryant a critical reading of his pioneering essays on functionalism. His old friend, the tragedian Edwin Forrest, sought his mediation in what would become the most sensational divorce case of the century, with Bryant and his family as witnesses. His long advocacy of a great central park in New York was consummated by the legislature. And in 1852, his eulogy on the life of James Fenimore Cooper became the first of several such orations which would establish him as the memorialist of his literary contemporaries in New York.

In The Genuine Article Paul Gilmore examines the interdependence of literary and mass culture at a crucial moment in U. S. history. Demonstrating from a new perspective the centrality of race to the construction of white manhood across class lines, Gilmore argues that in the years before the Civil War, as literature increasingly became another commodity in the capitalist cultural marketplace, American authors appropriated middle-brow and racially loaded cultural forms to bolster their masculinity. From characters in Indian melodramas and minstrel shows to exhibits in popular museums and daguerrotype galleries, primitive racialized figures circulated as “the genuine article” of manliness in the antebellum United States. Gilmore argues that these figures were manipulated, translated, and adopted not only by canonical authors such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, and Melville but also by African American and Native American writers like William Wells Brown and Okah Tubbee. By examining how these cultural notions of race played out in literary texts and helped to construct authorship as a masculine profession, Gilmore makes a unique contribution to theories of class formation in nineteenth-century America. The Genuine Article will enrich students and scholars of American studies, gender studies, literature, history, sociology, anthropology, popular culture, and race.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was America’s first novelist, celebrated for his masterpiece, The Last of the Mohicans. Over a prolific career he created a national mythology that endures to this day. According to Daniel Webster, “We may read the nation’s history in his life.” Yet Cooper was also a provocative figure, ultimately disillusioned with American democracy. He spent his boyhood in the wilds of the frontier, served as a merchant sailor and naval officer, traveled the courts of Europe in an age of upheaval and returned home to scandal and controversy. He conquered the literary world only to fall victim to his own fame. In the first popular biography of Cooper in a generation, historian Nick Louras brings the man and his age vividly to life.

Though the efficacy of literary biography has been widely contested by academic theorists, artention to the lives of authors remains an enduring fact of our literary history. Dedicated to Robert N. Hudspeth, editor of the Letters of Margaret Fuller and the Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, the eleven essays in this collection address from a practitioner's perspective the relationship between American literary biography, documentation, and interpretation.

The second volume of William Cullen Bryant's letters opens in 1836 as he has just returned to New York from an extended visit to Europe to resume charge of the New York Evening Post, brought near to failure during his absence by his partner William Leggett's mismanagement. At the period's close, Bryant has found in John Bigelow an able editorial associate and astute partner, with whose help he has brought the paper close to its greatest financial prosperity and to national political and cultural influence.Bryant's letters lf the years between show the versatility of his concern with the crucial political, social, artistic, and literary movements of his time, and the varied friendships he enjoyed despite his preoccupation with a controversial daily paper, and with the sustenance of a poetic reputation yet unequaled among Americans. As president of the New York Homeopathic Society, in letters and editorials urging widespread public parks, and in his presidency of the New York Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death, he gave attention to public health, recreation, and order. He urged the rights of labor, foreign and religious minorities, and free African Americans; his most powerful political effort of the period was in opposition to the spread of slavery through the conquest of Mexico. An early commitment to free trade in material goods was maintained in letters and editorials, and to that in ideas by his presidency of the American Copyright Club and his support of the efforts of Charles Dickens and Harriet Martineau to secure from the United States Congress and international copyright agreement.Included here are letters to prominent Americans, many of them his close friends, such as the two Danas, Bancroft, Cole, Cooper, Dewey, Dix, Downing, Durand, Forrest, Greenough, Irving, Longfellow, Simms, Tilden, Van Buren, and Weir. His letters to the Evening Post recounting his observations and experiences during travels abroad and in the South, West, and Northeast of the United States, which were copied widely in other newspapers and praised highly by many of their subscribers, are here made available to the present-day reader.

"The Lumley Autograph" by Susan Fenimore Cooper is a satirical work concerning the autograph-collecting mania of the mid-nineteenth century. Cooper was an American writer and amateur who enjoyed observing people and the world around her. The book follows the adventures of its main characters as they go on the hunt for the autographs they need to supposedly "complete" their collections. Its broad satire is deftly combined with the more serious irony of a poet's frantic appeal for help becoming an expensive plaything of the rich, while the poet himself has died of want.