We have read that there was little literature written in the United States before the 1800s. Franklin's writings, mostly on practical subjects, and the essays of Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, on political subjects, were almost the only works of permanent value written in the first two centuries after the beginning of American settlement. Great writers can be produced only where there is a community of educated and thoughtful people, such as one can not find in a young country.

Washington Irving, who is sometimes called the father of American literature, was born in New York in 1783. His first important book was a burlesque, called "Knickerbocker's History of New York," which is very amusing, and won praise for its author on both sides of the Atlantic. But Irving's most famous work is the "Sketch-Book," in which appear the charming tales of "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." His "Life of Washington" is still a standard biography. William Cullen Bryant, born in western Massachusetts in 1794, was the first American who became widely known as a poet. Though he lived to be very old, his greatest poem, "Thanatopsis," was written when he was not yet nineteen years of age.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most popular and the most widely celebrated of our poets, was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807. Of his shorter pieces. "Excelsior" and "The Psalm of Life" are best known. His "Hiawatha" is an epic poem of American Indian life, and his "Evangeline" is a narrative poem founded on the story of the expulsion of the Acadians.

John Greenleaf Whittier, sometimes called "the Quaker poet," was born in Massachusetts in the same year with Longfellow (1807). Many of his poems describe simple, rural life. Others relate to slavery and the Civil War. One of the most charming is "Snow-Bound," a description of winter scenes in New England.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in 1809. He is famous for his witty poems, of which "The Last Leaf" and "The One-Hoss Shay" are two of the best known. His prose work, "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," is thought to be one of the brightest books in our literature.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in 1809, wrote some poems that have achieved a world-wide fame. Of these, "The Raven" is the best known. His weird and marvelous short stories have also a permanent place in literature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803, in Boston. Some of his poems are greatly admired by literary readers; they can hardly be called popular. He is more widely known by his essays as a profound thinker and a writer of genius and poetic inspiration.

James Russell Lowell was born in 1819. He is best known to general readers by his poems in the New England dialect, called "The Biglow Papers." He is also a great critic and essayist.

Two American writers of fiction in the period before the Civil War attained a world-wide fame. James Fenimore Cooper was born in New Jersey in 1783. His novels are mostly stories, full of action and adventure. The most famous are those known as "The Leather-Stocking Tales." A very different writer is Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a rare genius, and wrote stories of a weird and subtle kind. Of these, "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables" are general favorites.

Our most famous historians are George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley, William H. Prescott, and Francis Parkman.

The writers who rose in this country after the Civil War differ from those who came before them, as American life differed from the life before the war: 1. The writers of this later period were not chiefly a group of people about New York or Boston. Every great natural division of the country was represented in the present school of writers. 2. They were not chiefly poets and essayists, like Longfellow and Emerson, Poe and Irving. The post-Civil War group of authors give themselves mainly to prose fiction and to humoristic writing. 3. They were remarkable for the zeal and faithfulness with which they study our own life. The manners and feelings of the American people in city and country were described with fullness, and the dialect of every region of the United States was reproduced in the pages of the later authors.

American art had its rise in a group of portrait-painters, of whom Gilbert Stuart was the chief. The conditions of life prior to the Civil War were unfavorable to the production of a great school of painters and sculptors, but there was a large advance in later years, and very notable work has been done in several departments of art. In the matter of book and magazine illustrations some American artists have taken a very high rank.