Romantics

"One man's justice is another's injustice: one man's beauty, another's ugliness: one man's wisdom, another's folly." (American literature p.223) Spoken by an American Author, Poet & Philosopher, I believe it was related to the romantic era because one person's views maybe different from the other, but all in all, we all do really appreciate American literature.

Literacy was all around America in the 1800's, but literacy groups were growing and growing over the years, making the cities nearly 100,000 people, including Boston. Then in 1840 the U.S. grew tremendously. Towns as small as 200 people, grew to 30,000 in a matter of 20-25 years. Back in the 1820's New York City was the city of culture, but as art & literacy grew Boston become the new city of culture.

In the early romantic period out came a spectacular writer, Washington Irving. Being one of the knickerbockers from New York City, he wrote all about folk tales and completely unrealistic events (American Literature p.172-173). One of these folk tales was "The Devil and Tom Walker". This tale, tells about a man who sells his soul to the devil back in the 1720's. Now what is quite peculiar about this tale, is back in the 1720's everyone's life had to be to devoted to God and only God. That's what makes this story so amazing, because no one would have ever done that back then, and that makes the story quite conflicting, which are my particular favorites.

Another early American writer was Edgar Allen Poe, who came from Baltimore, also one of the literature cities. He went to WestPoint, and began to start writing. As he wrote more and more stories, it seemed as though they were all quite sad, depressing and or scary, as if he had some kind of dark cloud hovering over him as he wrote. A lot of his stories were short stories. For example, "The