Johns Hopkins University Press. He also wrote the first African American play to be published, The Escape (1858). James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict everyday life in the Northeast. This is one of the best books I have ever read, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 February 2018, This is one of the best books I have ever read. Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century. He was the Russian writer who born on September 28, 1828 and died on 20th November 1910. The work seeks to illustrate the existentialist notion of ultimate freedom through presenting a detailed account of the characters' psychologies as they are forced to make significant decisions in their lives. Twain deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his writing. "Without the pen of the author of `Common Sense', the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain,' John Adams once wrote of him. Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), was among the earliest slave narratives and a forceful argument for abolition. Luebering is Executive Director of the Core Editorial Group at Encyclopaedia Britannica. He gives us the works of Pope, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and Defoe as evidence that Britain was very much influenced by the new ways of thinking engendered by the Age of Reason. It came to include British writers such as Locke and Hume, as well as Americans like Jefferson, Washington, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. Acoustics and Radio Technology: Fact or Fiction? These novels, called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the American wilderness in both realistic and highly romanticized ways. His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and naturalism and 20th-century modernism. Try again. In this lifetime; he was anonymous but with the start of 20th century, he became an influential figure in the history of visual arts of the Romantic Age and poetry. One of the notions is that ultimately a person's freedom is unassailable as it is fundamentally part of the nothingness that is the imagination and so cannot be taken away or destroyed. Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945. Thomas Paine is often associated with the American Revolution, because of his pamphlets; but The Age of Reason is still controversial (and has been banned) for its criticism of established religion and its challenge to the Bible. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories. He was also a great novelist, mesmerizing playwright, and a ground-breaking natural philosopher. As of January 2017 the book has been rated 9,666 times on GoodReads with an average score of 3.97 stars out of a possible five. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993. (Paine particularly wanted it to be easy-to-read so that it would be available to as many people as possible.