Excerpt from The Spirit of American Literature The historian is subservient to an ideal of encyclopedic completeness and to traditional values. He rules literature OR in sections; into each school and period he puts the great men, and then stuffs the chinks with such as N. P. Willis and Margaret Fuller, who may have been admirable persons but omitted to make literature. Life is short, and art, even American art, is long and vital. It is perplexing to find in current manuals no mention of Father Tabb, but a full page about Anne Bradstreet; a chapter on Bryant, but only a page about Sidney Lanier; extended accounts Of Charles Brockden Brown and William Gilmore Simms, but only half a page about Mark Twain. To be sure, the historian avowedly and properly puts emphasis on writers who are dead in the flesh, and finishes off his contemporaries briefly because they are not yet established and are too numerous to mention; But it seems well, in books about literature, not to discuss writers admittedly dead in the spirit, whose names persist by the inertia of reputation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.