Born into slavery in Kentucky, William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was kept functionally illiterate until after his escape at the age of nineteen. Brown wrote extensively as a journalist. This work…

In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Ezra Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture - a culture redefining its democratic identity.

Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) provides a cross-section of D. H. Lawrence’s writing on American literature, including landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel…