William Cullen Bryant: Author of America

Gilbert H. Muller

03.2010 г. · State University of New York Press

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2008 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Proclaimed by James Fenimore Cooper to be "the author of America," William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was one of nineteenth-century America's foremost poets and public intellectuals. In this, the first major biography of Bryant in almost forty years, Gilbert H. Muller reintroduces a quintessential New Yorker who commanded the nation's literary, cultural, urban, and political life for more than half a century.

A transplanted Yankee, Bryant arrived on the unpaved streets of Manhattan in the early 1820s and he would soon find himself at the locus of the many political and cultural transformations sweeping Manhattan and the nation. The bedrock of Bryant's cultural authority was his reputation as "America's first poet," and he enthralled a nation and his peers—including Whitman, Poe, Longfellow, and Emerson—who praised the excellence of his verse. A literary celebrity for almost seventy years, Bryant served as the editor of the New-York Evening Post for five decades, and was a major force behind the establishment of Central Park, the National Academy of Design, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Drawing on previously unavailable letters and nineteenth-century files of the New-York Evening Post, Muller creates a humanistic portrait of New York City's "first citizen," establishes him as a first-rate poet, and makes a convincing case for Bryant's role in defining the idea of democratic culture in America.

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Gilbert H. Muller is Professor Emeritus of English at the City University of New York. He is the author of Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Grotesque and New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction, and has also written critical biographies of the African American writers Chester Himes and John A. Williams. He lives in Port Washington, New York—close to William Cullen Bryant's estate, Cedarmere.