American Renaissance (literature)

American Renaissance (literature)

In American literature, the American Renaissance was a period during which many of the literary works most widely considered American masterpieces were produced. The period is generally defined as the mid-19th century but especially the years roughly from 1850 to 1855. Major works from those years include Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men (1850, though most of Emerson's best-known texts were published earlier), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), and Walt Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855).