Uncle Sam was into Romanticism too!

The romantic movement arrived to America from Europe during the early nineteenth century. Romanticism was well received by Americans since it had recently broken away from the British empire, who had longed to be free of strict religious tradition. The America's focus on freedom gave authors the power to freely express their ideas without fear of ridicule and controversy. Early romantic literature that made an early appearance in the United States was Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions. Other notable authors during the romantic movement are Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. The Romantic movement in America continues to this day to influences modern writers.

- Philip Siu