A survey of the regions of the United States in and around 1800. Remarkable flavor and details!! ( )

Brooks is a biographer not only of people, but of epochs and entire cities. Here, Jefferson, Franklin, Dunlap, Audubon, Cooper, Bryant, Crocket, Poe and Willis, in their swamps and cities-- Philadelphia and New York--and regions. This is far more than a biography of the gentle melancolic long-lived well-traveled and prolific writer, Washington Irving.

Introduces Philadelphia in 1800 drawn from the prolific letters between Matthew Carey, the publisher from this, the largest city in the USA with 70,000 inhabitants, and the itinerant book-hawker roving medical savant and ordained Episcopal minister, the Reverend Mason Lock Weems, his best-selling author.

Recounts how shocked Chateaubriand, Priestly, and others had been to observe the scandalous luxury and frivolous conversation of these lately colonial inhabitants.[5] They had expected the Pilgrims--found already extinct.

Irving was an international and famous figure by his 50s. He "relished politics for the drama in them" [285]. My boy. He was also associated with the great Unitarians and the Liberals who founded Our Government and public institutions.

Yet another fact-based solid "history" of America that demolishes the myths believed by a poisoned crop of suckers being taught to hate Liberals.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1890716.html

This is very entertaining and witty account of the American literary scene in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, using Washington Irving's life and career as a thread which unites a much broader discussion of American culture and other writers - I think there were as many chapters specifically about Poe as about Irving. There were a lot of things here I hadn't thought about - how in 1800 Philadephia was at the heart of the new nation, rather than the smaller and dubiously Dutch-speaking New York; how service in the early US Navy was an intellectually broadening experience; how big an earthquake the 1828 election was; how closely linked the various writers were by bonds of blood and friendship. I must admit I haven't read widely in this period - Davy Crockett, Poe, and failed attempts on The Scarlet Letter and The Last of the Mohicans and that's it - but Brooks made me feel that I could profitably try a bit more. ( )