One of the nation's first woman writers, literary pioneer Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) is ranked with Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant as a founder of American literature. In a career that spanned four decades before the Civil War, Sedgwick published six novels, including Hope Leslie and A New-Engl and Tale, and over one hundred short stories and sketches, as well as domestic novellas, travelogues, and books for children. Now the full breadth and complexity of Sedgwick's extensive oeuvre is examined for the first time in this groundbreaking volume, which pairs nineteenth-century reviews of her writings with new critical essays on her works. The collection illuminates Sedgwick's skillful use of rhetoric, her feminism, her realism, her reform activities, as well as her central role in shaping the nation's literature.