A truly strange book I kept seeing quoted in a recent literary criticism book I read. This book looks at the history of US letters from Leif Ericksen through the Civil War and attempts to write a kind of impressionistic history of that field. One of the weird things about American literature is how dominant fiction, poetry, and drama are in our thinking about it now, but basicall before Cooper and Irving, there was very little fiction happening, or rather, much of the fiction we […]