1949 david laskin literature review

1949 david laskin literature review

In the two weeks that I was home for Christmas break, I saw a number of teachers from my high school. One night the last week I was home, I was having dinner with an English teacher. After discussing the semester that had just ended, I told him what classes I was taking this semester, including the course on Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. He told me something that I found incredibly interesting. I hadn't known that. The idea of the Berkshires years ago intrigues me, and the idea that all of these people were here makes it even more interesting.

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In the two weeks that I was home for Christmas break, I saw a number of teachers from my high school. One night the last week I was home, I was having dinner with an English teacher. After discussing the semester that had just ended, I told him what classes I was taking this semester, including the course on Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. He told me something that I found incredibly interesting.

I hadn't known that. The idea of the Berkshires years ago intrigues me, and the idea that all of these people were here makes it even more interesting. American literature had never seemed much more personal to me than European literature; that is, until coming here I never felt any closer associations to American literature because of the setting since I didn't consider the setting of American literature particularly relevant to me in the Virgin Islands.

Suddenly Hawthorne and Melville seemed more accessible to me. Immediately I could see the forest scenes in The Scarlet Letter as taking place in woods I knew by Simon's Rock; the babbling brook became something bearing striking resemblance to Green River.

As to Hawthorne and Melville being friends, I had many questions: How and when did they meet? How close to each other were they? Did they influence each other's writing? How much of a record of their relationship had been recorded?

Did they write about each other? Did they remain friends for all of their lives? I had found not just a topic for a paper, but questions that I wanted answered. Not too surprisingly, I didn't give the topic much thought for the next few weeks. The semester hadn't even started yet. And then on the first day of class I learned that we were expected to write a non-traditional research paper and that Hawthorne and Melville had met picnicking on Monument Mountain.

Hearing about their first encounter, I had an incredibly silly image in my head. I saw two men, carrying copies of The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick , getting rather intoxicated while a bunch of children around them were playing laser tag. An absolutely absurd image, as laser tag in the 's would have been quite a trick. But the point of the image was clear: The Berkshires, the place where I am now, is a place full of legend and history. I saw myself and the rest of the class at Monument Mountain reading their works.

Monument Mountain still exists. The literature of the two authors still exists. And in a sense, the authors do as well.

They were more alive, more real and human not only literary figures , to me at that moment than I had imagined possible. A few weeks later I turned to the Internet to find information on Hawthorne and Melville and get ideas for other possible paper topics. At first it was incredibly frustrating. The first sites I found from search engines were false starts; I sat through almost two hours of absolutely useless information, trivial background information, and obnoxious advertisements.

I started thinking about how incredibly useless the Internet is, about how much garbage is on the Internet. My search continued, leading me to college syllabi, high school class projects, gothic web sites too much Trent Reznor and the ever-frightening "Hello Kitty" goth site , and the "Abort, Retry, Ignore" parody.

I wanted to find real information. Why, I wondered, aren't there more good literary sites on the web? I decided then that I wanted to compile information, to write something, and to have it accessible so that it could be useful for other people. I came to the conclusion that I wanted my project to be not just for the class, but for anyone who might be in a situation like myself and would appreciate finding information.

Finally, I hit the jackpot, ending up with over pages of information about 40 of which were useful. I hadn't given much thought to Hawthorne and Melville's wives, and I was interested to learn that they were important figures. I became interested in finding out more about Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne and found titles of a few books and articles to read.

For a little while I thought this would be my paper topic. Continuing on my web search I stumbled across, not too surprisingly, www. This web site proved to be a real wealth of information. In fact, I finally emailed jmadden mail. Oddly enough, a few weeks later I wrote a script to analyze weblogs and found a connection to a picture of me on April's web site from a computer named ahab.

I found a very good introduction to the relationship between Hawthorne and Melville. In the summer of Melville moved to Pittsfield. Hawthorne lived less than six miles away in Lenox. Hawthorne was forty-six and Melville was thirty-one, a large enough age difference for many to comment on Melville's feelings for Hawthorne being a search for the father figure he had lost early in life.

I later found some rather Freudian readings of their relationship. They started visiting each other almost immediately after that and kept up their friendship for two years, meeting again rather unceremoniously four years later in Liverpool. The article speculates that their relationship tapered off because Melville was too clingy and Hawthorne's success relative to Melville's created a barrier.

At www. I read through them eagerly, fascinated by their content, as well as that I was able to find them so easily. At this point I was nearly singing praises to the Internet. Finding the letters without the Internet would have been much more time-consuming. As it was, given four hours of work, I was able to read what Melville had written to Hawthorne, something I consider to be one of the most authoritative and certainly authentic sources for my paper.

What follows is really a series of quotations from these letters. This is the only time in my Inquiry Log that I will do a lot of quoting instead of paraphrasing sorry , but I feel it is necessary to do this because the letters are one of my only primary sources.

That is, I and other scholars can speculate about Hawthorne and Melville, but authenticity is lost in the paraphrase. Their relationship consisted of a series of letters and a number of visits, usually to Hawthorne's abode. Melville does invite Hawthorne to visit him as well, saying he will extend all courtesies to Hawthorne and also telling him that his is not a "prim nonsensical house" Melville, Letter to Hawthorne, January His invitation was extended to the whole family, showing that Melville's relationship was not only with Nathaniel, but with his family, the sort of family that Melville never had.

Alcohol shows up numerous times in the letters. The two writers drank together frequently, mixing "wine with wisdom," and even shh! In their letters they also discussed their works. After less than a year of letters it seems that Hawthorne was getting slightly tired with their correspondence, and Melville responds that he means "to continue visiting [until he is told that his] visits are both supererogatory and superfluous" Melville, Letter to Hawthorne, June In the same letter Melville gets hot and steamy, echoing the sentiments and idea of the seed from "Hawthorne and His Mosses:" "if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert.

Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. Melville tries to recapture the feelings he had when he first read one of Hawthorne's letters to him. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book.

I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb" Melville, Letter to Hawthorne, November In addition to sharing hearts, Melville also write about them having the same lips with which they drink the "flagon of life.

He feels the need to state that he is not mad even though he is incoherent. He concludes, "What a pity, that, for your plain, bluff letter, you should get such gibberish! Mention me to Mrs. Hawthorne and to the children, and so, good-by to you, with my blessing. No such thing! I sh'n't always answer your letters, and you may do just as you please" Melville, Letter to Hawthorne, November Their correspondences tapers significantly, and then Melville writes to Hawthorne with an idea for a story the Agatha story which he thinks Hawthorne would be better able to write.

Later Hawthorne tells Melville he should write the story, but neither of them ever do. And that is, more or less, their surviving correspondence. Hawthorne's letters were destroyed although his journals, which I later read, remain. Reading the letters I felt that something was missing. Melville and Hawthorne write fairly frequently, Melville becomes rather impassioned, and then the letters become less frequent. After reading the letters, I was more puzzled by and curious about the disintegration of their friendship.

I was also dying to know, or to hypothesize, what Hawthorne had written in response. I considered attempting to ghostwrite letters for him. Most of my web based research was done that first night. But several weeks later after reading some books, I returned to webpages with more specific goals in mind. I attempted to analyze it making use of this background knowledge. He writes of Hawthorne as being shy "hermit-mound," "shyest grape" and he refers to vines and grapes, which might be a reference to the wine shared between the two men and hence their relationship.

I intended to return to "Monody" and write some analysis of it, but as it is my paper is too long. Laskin, David. Hanover, NH. I had another great find besides the Internet. A few weeks into the semester I received a book from the teacher who had told me about Hawthorne and Melville. The actual writing in the book was superior to that of the other books, essays, articles, and theses that I read on the topic, and it made for an enjoyable, leisurely read.

Cover Letter To Prospective Client, David Laskin Literature Review, Custom Dissertation Conclusion Writer For Hire For Masters Sample Resume. David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (; repr., Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of Writings from Partisan Review (New York: Columbia University Press, ),

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Education: Northwestern University, B.

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Philip Rahv

In he and William Phillips co-founded Partisan Review , one of the most influential literary periodicals in the first half of the twentieth century. Initially affiliated with the Communist Party and adhering to their agenda of proletarian literature , Rahv went on to publish a broad spectrum of modern writers in the pages of his magazine. He was one of the first to introduce Kafka to American readers. The family escaped and spent two years in Vienna , where Philip attended the gymnasium. He lived for a time in Palestine where his mother chose to live, and worked as a teacher of Hebrew , in Portland , Oregon from to He wrote at first under the name Philip Rann.

Doig, Ivan 1939–

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