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Prolegomenon Given the proper respect due actuarial tables in these matters, this book stands a fair chance of being my last in literary history or criticism. Should that prove to be the case, most of the books I projected writing when I left graduate school will remain locked in my evanescing mind. For no reason that matters to my fellow man, I regret that. Immersion in the imaginations of writers who sought to spin their experience into poeïsis has enriched my life. Although even a cursory consideration of English departments belies the piety that literature ennobles its students and refines moral sentiments, I recognize that my reading over the decades has sharpened my perception of humanity. Would that I had had more years to dive deeper into the profound worlds of Herman Melville and William Faulkner, America’s greatest poets. Fate directed me instead toward a complex man who, though possibly the most intelligent of our writers, never attained the summits of true immortality. But that has not made him less intriguing to me. Perhaps because I am the child of immigrants to whom America was the full share of the heaven they dared dream of reaching, the idiosyncratic qualities of the American mind have always fascinated me, and in Bryant I met an early champion of expression of America’s unique genius. Somehow we have recognized the historical importance of Washington Irving and enshrined Poe and Hawthorne as the opposed pillars that support the tradition of the American tale, but in that reduction, we have sacrificed an appreciation of the complexity in our nascent literary history. Bryant, whose stories have been all but lost, deserves rediscovery, not only as an exhibit of the variety in the roil of a literary movement groping for purpose and definition but also for the quality of his better fiction. That, after almost a century of scholarly activity in that academic purlieu we call American Studies, Bryant’s contribution to the emergence of our fiction has continued to go unnoticed is nothing short of a scandal. This volume proposes to remedy that neglect. White River Junction, VT Frank Gado ...

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