English and American Literature for English 15

English 15 (English and American Literature) Printed 4/21/2015/12:00 Noon

Republic of the Philippines
Surigaodel Sur StateUniversity
College of Teacher Education
Main Campus, Tandag City
Compilationof InstructionalMaterials in
English 15
(EnglishandAmericanLiterature)
M-F/11:00AM-2:00PM
Room No.
PreparedandPresentedby:
MR. ANGELITO T. PERA
BSED-II English
PresentedandSubmittedto:
DR. EVELYN T. BAGOOD
English Professor
PrintedDateandTime:
April 21, 2015/12:00 Noon

Summer Class 2015
Table of Contents
I-Preliminaries
Glimpse - - - - - - - - - i
Highlights of English and American Literature- - ii
Rating Per Lesson - - - - - - - iii
II-Lesson Proper
Lesson 1 - - - - - - - - - 1-18
Works of Anne Bradstreet
Lesson 2 - - - - - - - - - 12-25
Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford
Lesson 3 - - - - - - - - - 27-41
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Lesson 4 - - - - - - - - - 42-59
Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs
Lesson 5 - - - - - - - - - 60-74
Henry David Thoreau
Lesson 6 - - - - - - - - - 75-90
Washington Irving
Lesson 7 - - - - - - - - - 91-104
Edgar Allan Poe
Lesson 8 - - - - - - - - - 105-124
The Ascent to Fame of Nathaniel Hawthorne/Samson
Occom’s A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses
Paul,an Indian
Lesson 9 - - - - - - - - - 125-131
Young Goodman Brown and Other Hawthorne Short Stories
Summary and Analysis of Roger Malvin’s Burial
Lesson 10 - - - - - - - - - 132-141
Walt Whitman
Lesson Finale - - - - - - - - 142-158
Comtemporary American Literature/Chang-rae Lee

III-Furtherinfo
Anne Bradstreet - - - - - - - 1-4
William Bradford - - - - - - - 5-8
Mary Rowlandson - - - - - - - 9-11
Benjamin Franklin - - - - - - - 12-13
Harriet Jacobs - - - - - - - 13-19
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - - - 20-25
Frederick Douglass - - - - - - - - 26-28
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
29-31
Henry David Thoreau - - - - - - - - 32-35
Washington Irving - - - - - - - - 36-39
Rip Van Winkle - - - - - - - - 40-42
Sleepy Hollow - - - - - - - - 42-45
Edgar Allan Poe - - - - - - - - 45-47
Nathaniel Hawthorne - - - - - - - - 47-50
Samson Occom - - - - - - - - 51-54
Young Goodman Brown - - - - - - - 54-55
Roger Malvin's Burial - - - - - - 56-57
Walt Whitman - - - - - - - - 58-60
Leaves of Grass - - - - - - - - 60-62
Chang-rae Lee - - - - - - - - 63-64
IV-Bibliography - - - - - - - - 65
V-Curriculum Vitae - - - - - - - - 66-67

PRELIMINARIES

Glimpse
We can imagine that life is like a literature
With meaningful stories and experiences
Of the past, to the present and in the future
When we read stories from great men and women
We travelled back to their time and warmly embraced
Their beliefs, thoughts and actions.
We began to see their lives and felt of their sympathies
agonies, sadness and even hopes for peace and serenity
We are inspired of their beliefs, stories and thoughts
That we think of time of their time to the time
When they thought of life with God and humanity
Time will never come back to its baseline
Instead, time shall go and continue its odyssey
Until we remember that life is like a literature
Neither a Will of God nor a destiny
Of man and woman to mankind
It is literature that lives memories
Of great men and women in eternity
Their masterpieces inspire mankind to live
With hope, unity, courage, and fidelity

So, a glimpse to literature is history.
The Author
Highlights of the English and American Literature
English Literature
The focus of this article is on English-language literature
rather than limited merely to the literature of England, so that it
includes writers from Scotland, the whole of Ireland, Wales, as
well as literature in English from former British colonies,
including the US. However, up until the early 19th century, it
deals with the literature written in English
of Britain and Ireland.
Furthermore, English literature is generally seen as beginning
with the epic poem Beowulf, that dates from between the 8th to the
11th centuries, the most famous work in Old English, which has
achieved national epic status in England, despite being set
in Scandinavia. The next important landmark is the works of the
poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), especially The Canterbury
Tales. Then during The Renaissance, especially the late 16th and
early 17th centuries, major drama and poetry was written by William
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne and many others. Another great
poet, from later in the 17th century, was John Milton (1608–74)
author of theepic poem Paradise Lost (1667).
The late 17th and the early 18th century are particularly
associated with satire, especially in the poetry of John
Dryden and Alexander Pope, and the prose works of Jonathan Swift.
The 18th century also saw the first British novels in the works
of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, while the

late 18th and early 19th century was the period of the Romantic
poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats.
It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became
the leading literary genre in English,[1] dominated especially
byCharles Dickens, but there were many other significant writers,
including the Brontë sisters, and then Thomas Hardy, in the final
decades of the 19th century. Americans began to produce major
writers in the 19th century, including novelist Herman Melville,
author of Moby Dick (1851) and the poets Walt Whitman and Emily
Dickinson. Another American, Henry James, was a major novelist of
the late 19th and early twentieth century, while Polish-born Joseph
Conrad was perhaps the most important British novelist of the first
two decades of the 20th century.[citation needed]
Irish writers were especially important in the 20th century,
including James Joyce, and later Samuel Beckett, both central
figures in the Modernist movement. Americans, like poets T. S.
Eliot and Ezra Pound and novelist William Faulkner, were other
important modernists. In the mid 20th century major writers started
to appear in the various countries of the British Commonwealth,
several who have been Nobel-laureates. Many major writers in
English in the 20th and 21st centuries have come from outside
the United Kingdom. The term Postmodern literature is used to
describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is
both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of
the modernist period, relying heavily, for example, on
fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc., and a
reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist
literature.
American Literature is the literature written or produced in
the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more
specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the
United States and Theater in the United States. During its early
history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern
coast of the present-day United States. Therefore, its literary

tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English
literature. However, unique American characteristics and the
breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a
separate path and tradition.
The New England colonies were the center of early American
literature. The revolutionary period contained political writings
bySamuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. In the post-war
period, Thomas Jefferson's United States Declaration of
Independence solidified his status as a key American writer. It was
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nation's first
novels were published. With the War of 1812 and an increasing
desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a
number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most
prominently Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1836, Ralph
Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) started a movement known
as Transcendentalism. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) wrote Walden,
which urges resistance to the dictates of organized society. The
political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writings
of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-
famous Uncle Tom's Cabin. These efforts were supported by the
continuation of the slave narrative autobiography, of which the
best known example from this period was Frederick Douglass's
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) is notable for his
masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, a novel about adultery. Hawthorne
influencedHerman Melville (1819–1891) who is notable for the
books Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. America's two greatest 19th-century
poets were Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830–
1886). American poetry reached its peak in the early-to-mid-20th
century, with such noted writers as Wallace Stevens, T. S.
Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings. Mark Twain
(the pen name used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) was the
first major American writer to be born away from the East
Coast. Henry James (1843–1916) was notable for novels like The Turn

of the Screw. At the beginning of the 20th century, American
novelists included Edith Wharton (1862–1937), Stephen Crane (1871–
1900), and Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945). Experimentation in style
and form is seen in the works of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946).
American writers expressed disillusionment following WW I. The
stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) capture the
mood of the 1920s, and John Dos Passos wrote about the war. Ernest
Hemingway (1899–1961) became notable for The Sun Also Rises and A
Farewell to Arms; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in
Literature. William Faulkner (1897–1962) is notable for novels
like The Sound and the Fury. American drama attained international
status only in the 1920s and 1930s, with the works of Eugene
O'Neill, who won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize. In the
middle of the 20th century, American drama was dominated by the
work of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well
as by the maturation of the American musical.

LESSON PER RATING
Rating
Lesson 1 - - - - - - - - - -
Works of Anne Bradstreet
Lesson 2 - - - - - - - - - -
Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford
Lesson 3 - - - - - - - - - -
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Lesson 4 - - - - - - - - - -
Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs
Lesson 5 - - - - - - - - - -
Henry David Thoreau
Lesson 6 - - - - - - - - - -
Washington Irving
Lesson 7 - - - - - - - - - -
Edgar Allan Poe
Lesson 8 - - - - - - - - - -
The Ascent to Fame of Nathaniel Hawthorne/Samson
Occom’s A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses
Paul,an Indian
Lesson 9 - - - - - - - - - -
Young Goodman Brown and Other Hawthorne Short Stories
Summary and Analysis of Roger Malvin’s Burial
Lesson 10 - - - - - - - - - -
Walt Whitman
Lesson Finale - - - - - - - - -
Comtemporary American Literature/Chang-rae Lee

Total - - - - - - - - - - ______
Certified Correct:
DR. EVELYN T. BAGOOD
Professor IV
LESSON PROPER

Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 to anonconformist
former soldier of Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Dudley, who
managed the affairs of the Earl of Lincoln. In 1630
he sailed with his family for America with the
Massachusetts Bay Company. Also sailing was his
associate and son-in-law, Simon Bradstreet. At 25, he
had married Anne Dudley, 16, his childhood sweetheart
Anne had been well tutored in literature and history in Greek,
Latin, French, Hebrew, as well as English. The voyage on the
"Arbella" with John Winthrop took three months and was quite
difficult, with several people dying from the experience. Life was
rough and cold, quite a change from the beautiful estate with its
well-stocked library where Anne spent many hours. As Anne tells her
children in her memoirs, "I found a new world and new manners at
which my heart rose [up in protest.]"a. However, she did decide to
join the church at Boston. As White writes, "instead of looking
outward and writing her observations on this unfamiliar scene with
its rough and fearsome aspects, she let her homesick imagination
turn inward, marshalled the images from her store of learning and
dressed them in careful homespun garments."
Historically, Anne's identity is primarily linked to her
prominent father and husband, both governors of Massachusetts who
left portraits and numerous records. Though she appreciated their
love and protection, "any woman who sought to use her wit, charm,
or intelligence in the community at large found herself ridiculed,
banished, or executed by the Colony's powerful group of male
leaders."Her domain was to be domestic, separated from the linked
affairs of church and state, even "deriving her ideas of God from

the contemplations of her husband's excellencies," according to one
document.
This situation was surely made painfully clear to her in the
fate of her friend Anne Hutchinson, also intelligent, educated, of
a prosperous family and deeply religious. The mother of 14 children
and a dynamic speaker, Hutchinson held prayer meetings where women
debated religious and ethical ideas. Her belief that the Holy
Spirit dwells within a justified person and so is not based on the
good works necessary for admission to the church was considered
heretical; she was labelled a Jezebel and banished, eventually
slain in an Indian attack in New York. No wonder Bradstreet was not
anxious to publish her poetry and especially kept her more personal
works private.
Bradstreet wrote epitaphs for both her mother and father which
not only show her love for them but shows them as models of male
and female behavior in the Puritan culture.
An Epitaph on my dear and ever honoured mother, Mrs. Dorothy
Dudley, Who deceased December 27, 1643, and of her age, 61
Here lies/ A worthy matron of unspotted life,/ A loving mother and
obedient wife,/ A friendly neighbor, pitiful to poor,/ Whom oft she
fed, and clothed with her store;/ To servants wisely aweful, but
yet kind,/ And as they did, so they reward did find:/ A true
instructor of her family,/ The which she ordered with dexterity,/
The public meetings ever did frequent,/ And in her closest constant
hours she spent;/ Religious in all her words and ways,/ Preparing
still for death, till end of days:/ Of all her children, children
lived to see,/ Then dying, left a blessed memory.
Compare this with the epitaph she wrote for her father:
Within this tomb a patriot lies/ That was both pious, just and
wise,/ To truth a shield, to right a wall,/ To sectaries a whip and
maul,/ A magazine of history,/ A prizer of good company/ In manners
pleasant and severe/ The good him loved, the bad did fear,/ And
when his time with years was spent/ In some rejoiced, more did
lament./ 1653, age 77

There is little evidence about Anne's life in Massachusetts
beyond that given in her poetry--no portrait, no grave marker
(though there is a house in Ipswich, MA). She and her family moved
several times, always to more remote frontier areas where Simon
could accumulate more property and political power. They would have
been quite vulnerable to Indian attack there; families of powerful
Puritans were often singled out for kidnapping and ransom. Her
poems tell us that she loved her husband deeply and missed him
greatly when he left frequently on colony business to England and
other settlements (he was a competent administrator and eventually
governor). However, her feelings about him, as well as about her
Puritan faith and her position as a woman in the Puritan community,
seem complex and perhaps mixed. They had 8 children within about 10
years, all of whom survived childhood. She was frequently ill and
anticipated dying, especially in childbirth, but she lived to be 60
years old.
Anne seems to have written poetry primarily for herself, her
family, and her friends, many of whom were very well educated. Her
early, more imitative poetry, taken to England by her brother-in-
law (possibly without her permission), appeared as The Tenth Muse
Lately Sprung Up in America in 1650 when she was 38 and sold well
in England. Her later works, not published in her lifetime although
shared with friends and family, were more private and personal--and
far more original-- than those published in The Tenth Muse. Her
love poetry, of course, falls in this group which in style and
subject matter was unique for her time, strikingly different from
the poetry written by male contemporaries, even those in
Massachusetts such as Edward Taylor and Michael Wigglesworth.
Although she may have seemed to some a strange aberration of
womanhood at the time, she evidently took herself very seriously as
an intellectual and a poet. She read widely in history, science,
and literature, especially the works of Guillame du Bartas,
studying her craft and gradually developing a confident poetic
voice. Her "apologies" were very likely more a ironic than sincere,

responding to those Puritans who felt women should be silent,
modest, living in the private rather than the public sphere. She
could be humorous with her "feminist" views, as in a poem on Queen
Elizabeth I:
Now say, have women worth, or have they none
Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone?
Nay, masculines, you have taxed us long;
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our sex is void of reason,
Know 'tis a slander now, but once was treason.
One must remember that she was a Puritan, although she often
doubted, questioning the power of the male hierarchy, even
questioning God (or the harsh Puritan concept of a judgmental God).
Her love of nature and the physical world, as well as the
spiritual, often caused creative conflict in her poetry. Though she
finds great hope in the future promises of religion, she also finds
great pleasures in the realities of the present, especially of her
family, her home and nature (though she realized that perhaps she
should not, according to the Puritan perspective).
Although few other American women were to publish poetry for the
next 200 years, her poetry was generally ignored until
"rediscovered" by feminists in the 20th century. These critics have
found many significant artistic qualities in her work.
"To My Dear and Loving Husband," "A Letter to Her Husband,
Absent Upon Public Employment" and "The Prologue"and "The Author
to Her Book"(with study materials)
Selected Poems by Bradstreet (University of Toronto)
William Bradford (1590-1657), one of the Pilgrim
Fathers, was the leader of the Plymouth Colony in
America. His extraordinary history, "Of Plymouth
Plantation, " was not published until 1856.On March
19, 1590, William Bradford was baptized at
Austerfield, Yorkshire, England. His father, a
yeoman farmer, died when William was only a year old

.The boy was trained by relatives to be a farmer. He was still
young when he joined a group of Separatists (Protestant radicals
who separated from the established Church of England) in nearby
Scrooby. For most of the rest of his life, the best source is his
Of Plymouth Plantation.
Becoming a Pilgrim
In 1607 Bradford and about 120 others were attacked as
nonconformists to the Church of England. They withdrew to Holland,
under the religious leadership of John Robinson and William
Brewster, living for a year at Amsterdam and then in Leiden, where
they stayed nearly 12 years. They were very poor; Bradford worked
in the textile industry. In these hard years he seems to have
managed to get something of an education because he lived with the
Brewsters near a university. Bradford was attracted to the ideal of
a close-knit community such as the Scrooby group had established.
At the age of 23 he married 16-year-old Dorothy May, who belonged
to a group of Separatists that had come earlier from England.
The threat of religious wars, the difficulty of earning a
decent living, the loss from the community of children who
assimilated Dutch ways, the zeal for missionary activity— these
forces led the Scrooby group to consider becoming "Pilgrims" by
leaving Holland for America. After many delays they chose New
England as their goal, and with financial support from London
merchants and from Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who claimed rights to the
American area they sought, the Pilgrims readied to leave for
America.
Signing the Mayflower Compact
But the terms arranged for the colonists by their deacon were
treacherous; the backers and the settlers were to share ownership
in the land the colonists improved and the dwellings they
constructed. Many of the Pilgrims' coreligionists backed out of the
enterprise, and a group of "strangers" was recruited to replace
them. When one of their two ships, theSpeedwell, proved
unseaworthy, the expedition was delayed further. Finally, in

September 1620 theMayflower departed alone, its 102 passengers
almost equally divided between "saints" and "strangers." The men on
board signed a compact that established government by consent of
the governed, the "Mayflower Compact." John Carver (with Brewster,
the oldest of the saints) was elected governor.
On landing at Cape Cod in November, a group led by Myles Standish
went ashore to explore; they chose Plymouth harbor for their
settlement. Meanwhile Dorothy Bradford had drowned. (In 1623
Bradford married a widow from Leiden, with whom he had three
children.)
The settlers soon began to construct dwellings. The winter was
harsh; one of many who died of the illness that swept the colony
was Governor Carver. Bradford became governor, and under him the
colonists learned to survive. Squanto, a Native American who had
lived in England, taught the settlers to grow corn; and they came
to know Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoag tribe. A vivid report on
these early adventures written by Bradford and Edward Winslow was
sent to England and published as Mourt's Relation (1622); with it
went clapboard and other materials gathered by the settlers to
begin paying off their debts. (Unfortunately the cargo was pirated
by a French privateer—a typical piece of Pilgrim bad luck.)
Bradford was responsible for the financial burdens as well as the
governing of the colony until his death, though for some five years
he did not officially serve as governor. These years saw the debt
continue to grow (with great effort it was paid off in 1648).
Developing Plymouth Colony
The population of the colony gradually increased, and by 1623 there
were 32 houses and 180 residents. Yet during Bradford's lifetime
the colony, which began for religious reasons mainly, never had a
satisfactory minister. John Robinson, a great pastor in Holland who
had been expected to guide the saints, never reached America. One
clergyman who did come, John Lyford, was an especially sharp thorn
in Bradford's side. Eventually he was exiled, with the result that

the London backers regarded the colonists as contentious and
incapable of self-rule.
Gradually as Plymouth Colony came to encompass a number of
separate settlements, Bradford's particular idea of community was
lost. After 1630 the colony was overshadowed by its neighbor, the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. But in fact Plymouth never amounted to
much as a political power. By 1644 the entire colony's population
was still a mere 300. Plymouth did make other northern colonizing
efforts attractive; it supplied important material aid to the Bay
Colony, and it may have helped establish its Congregational church
polity as the "New England way." Bradford was admired by Governor
John Winthrop of Boston, with whom he frequently met to discuss
common problems.
Bradford the Man
Bradford's private life was distinguished by self-culture. He
taught himself Greek and came to know classical poetry and
philosophy as well as contemporary religious writers. He worked on
his great history, Of Plymouth Plantation, from 1630 until 1646,
adding little afterward. Most of the events were described in
retrospect. He wrote as a believer in God's providence, but the
book usually has an objective tone. Though far from being an
egotist, Bradford emerges as the attractive hero of his story. The
last pages reflect his recognition that the colony was not a
success, and the book has been called a tragic history. Though he
stopped writing his history altogether in 1650, he remained
vigorous and active until his death in 1657.
Further Reading
A convenient modern edition of Bradford's history was prepared
by Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647
(1952). Another edition was published in 1962, edited and with an
introduction by Harvey Wish. The best biography is Bradford Smith,
Bradford of Plymouth (1951). G. F. Willison, Saints and Strangers
(1945), an account of the Pilgrims, contains much material on
Bradford. Background works include Harvey Wish, Society and Thought

in Early America (1950); Ruth A. Mclntyre, Debts Hopeful and
Desperate: Financing the Plymouth Colony (1963); and George D.
Langdon, Jr., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620-1691
(1966).
Mary Rowlandson, née White, later Mary Talcott (c.
1637 –January 5, 1711) was a colonial American woman
who was captured by Native Americans during King
Philip's War and held for 11 weeks before being
ransomed. In 1682, six years after her ordeal, The
Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative
of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Rowlandson
This text is considered a seminal American work in the literary
genre of captivity narratives. It went through four printings in
1682 and garnered readership both in the New England colonies and
in England, leading it to be considered by some the first American
"bestseller."
Biography
Mary White was born c. 1637 in Somersetshire, England. The
family left England sometime before 1650, settled at Salem in
the Massachusetts Bay Colony and moved in 1653 to Lancaster, on the
Massachusetts frontier. There, she married Reverend Joseph
Rowlandson, the son of Thomas Rowlandson of Ipswich, Massachusetts,
in 1656. Four children were born to the couple between 1658 and
1669, with their first daughter dying young.
At sunrise on February 10, 1675, during King Philip's War,
Lancaster came attacked by Narragansett, Wanapanoag and
Nashaway/Nipmuc Indians.During the attack, which was anticipated by
residents including Mary's husband, Joseph, the Native American
raiding party killed 13 people, while at least 24 were taken
captive, many of them injured. Rowlandson and her three children,
Joseph, Mary, and Sarah, were among those taken in the raid.

Rowlandson's 6 year old daughter, Sarah, would eventually succumb
from her wounds after a week of captivity.
For more than 11 weeks,[4] Rowlandson and her children were
forced to accompany the Indians as they travelled through the
wilderness to carry out other raids and to elude the English
militia. In Rowlandson's captivity narrative, the severe conditions
of her captivity are recounted in visceral detail. On May 2, 1676,
Rowlandson was ransomed for £20 raised by the women of Boston in a
public subscription, and paid by John Hoar of Concord at Redemption
Rock in Princeton, Massachusetts. In 1677, Reverend Rowlandson
moved his family to Wethersfield, Connecticut where he was
installed as pastor in April of that year. He died in Wethersfield
in November 1678. Church officials granted his widow a pension of
£30 per year.
Mary Rowlandson and her children moved to Boston where she is
thought to have written her captivity narrative, although her
original manuscript has not survived. It was published
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1682, and in London the same year.
At one time scholars believed that Rowlandson had died before her
narrative was published,[5] but she lived for many more years. On
August 6, 1679, she had married Captain Samuel Talcott and taken
his surname.[6] She eventually died on January 5, 1711, outliving
her spouse by more than 18 years.[6]
The Sovereignty and Goodness of God
Following her ransom, Rowlandson is thought to have composed a
private narrative of her captivity recounting the stages of her
odyssey in twenty distinct "Removes" or journeys. During the attack
on Lancaster, she witnessed the murder of friends and family, some
stripped naked and disemboweled. Upon her capture, she travelled
with her youngest child Sarah, suffering starvation, injury and
depression en route to a series of Indian villages. Sarah, aged 6
years and 5 months, died en route. Mary and her other surviving
children were kept separately and sold as property, until she was
finally reunited with her husband. Passages from the Bible are

cited numerous times within the narrative and functions as a source
of Rowlandson's solace. The text of her narrative is replete with
verses and references describing conditions similar to her own, and
have fueled much speculation regarding the influence of Increase
Mather in the production of the text.
The tensions between colonists and Native Americans,
particularly in the aftermath of King Philip's War, were a source
of anxiety in the colonies. While in fear of losing connection to
their own culture and society, Puritan colonists were curious about
the experience of one who had lived among Native people as a
captive and returned to colonial society. Many literate English
people were familiar with the captivity narratives written by
English and European traders and explorers during the 17th century,
who were taken captive at sea off the coast of North Africa and in
the Mediterranean and sometimes sold into slavery in the Middle
East.[7] The narratives were often expressed as spiritual journeys
and redemptions.
The publication of Rowlandson's captivity narrative earned the
colonist an important place in the history of American
literature. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs.
Mary Rowlandson is among the most frequently cited examples of a
captivity narrative and is often viewed as an archetypal model.
This important American literary genre functioned as a source of
information for eighteenth and nineteenth-century writersJames
Fenimore Cooper, Ann Bleecker, John Williams, and James Seaver, in
their portrayals of colonial history. Because of Rowlandson's
encounter with her Indian captors, her narrative is also
interesting for its treatment of intercultural contact. Finally, in
its use of autobiography, Biblical typology, and similarity to the
"Jeremiad", "A narrative of the Captivity" offers valuable insight
into the Puritan mind.

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in
Boston in what was then known as the Massachusetts
Bay Colony. His father, Josiah Franklin, a soap and
candle maker, had 17 children, seven with first
wife, Anne Child, and 10 with second wife Abiah
Folger. Benjamin was his 15th child and the last
son. Despite his success at the Boston Latin School,
Ben was removed at 10 to work with his father at candle making, but
dipping wax and cutting wicks didn’t fire his imagination. Perhaps
to dissuade him from going to sea as one of his brothers had done,
Josiah apprenticed Ben at 12 to his brother James at his print
shop. Ben took to this like a duck to water, despite his brother’s
hard treatment. When James refused to publish any of his brother’s
writing, Ben adopted the pseudonym Mrs. Silence Dogood, and “her”
14 imaginative and witty letters were published in his brother’s
newspaper, The New England Courant, to the delight of the
readership. But James was angry when it was discovered the letters
were his brother’s, and Ben abandoned his apprenticeship shortly
afterward, escaping to New York, but settling in Philadelphia,
which was his home base for the rest of his life.
Franklin furthered his education in the printing trade in
Philadelphia, lodging at the home of John Read in 1723, where he
met and courted Read’s daughter Deborah. Nevertheless, the
following year, Franklin left for London under the auspices of
Pennsylvania Governor William Keith, but felt duped when letters of
introduction never arrived and he was forced to find work at print
shops there. Once employed, though, he was able to take full
advantage of the city’s pleasures, attending theater, mingling with

the populace in coffee houses and continuing his lifelong passion
for reading. He also managed to publish his first pamphlet, "A
Dissertation upon Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain."
Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726 to find that Deborah Read
had married. In the next few years he held varied jobs such as
bookkeeper, shopkeeper and currency cutter. He also fathered a son,
William, out of wedlock during this time. In late 1727, Franklin
formed the “Junto,” a social and self-improvement study group for
young men, and early the next year was able to establish his own
print shop with a partner.
Harriet Jacobs, daughter of Delilah, the slave of
Margaret Horniblow, and Daniel Jacobs, the slave of
Andrew Knox, was born in Edenton, North Carolina, in
the fall of 1813. Until she was six years old
Harriet was unaware that she was the property of
Margaret Horniblow. Before her death in 1825,
Harriet's relatively kind mistress taught her slave
to read and sew. In her will, Margaret Horniblow bequeathed eleven-
year-old Harriet to a niece, Mary Matilda Norcom. Since Mary Norcom
was only three years old when Harriet Jacobs became her slave,
Mary's father, Dr. James Norcom, an Edenton physician, became
Jacobs's de facto master. Under the regime of James and Maria
Norcom, Jacobs was introduced to the harsh realities of slavery.
Though barely a teenager, Jacobs soon realized that her master was
a sexual threat.
From 1825, when she entered the Norcom household, until 1842, the
year she escaped from slavery, Harriet Jacobs struggled to avoid
the sexual victimization that Dr. Norcom intended to be her fate.
Although she loved and admired her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, a
free black woman who wanted to help Jacobs gain her freedom, the
teenage slave could not bring herself to reveal to her unassailably
upright grandmother the nature of Norcom's threats. Despised by the
doctor's suspicious wife and increasingly isolated by her
situation, Jacobs in desperation formed a clandestine liaison with

Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a white attorney with whom Jacobs had two
children, Joseph and Louisa, by the time she was twenty years old.
Hoping that by seeming to run away she could induce Norcom to sell
her children to their father, Jacobs hid herself in a crawl space
above a storeroom in her grandmother's house in the summer of 1835.
In that "little dismal hole" she remained for the next seven years,
sewing, reading the Bible, keeping watch over her children as best
she could, and writing occasional letters to Norcom designed to
confuse him as to her actual whereabouts. In 1837 Sawyer was
elected to the United States House of Representatives. Although he
had purchased their children in accordance with their mother's
wishes, Sawyer moved to Washington, D.C. without emancipating
either Joseph or Louisa. In 1842 Jacobs escaped to the North by
boat, determined to reclaim her daughter from Sawyer, who had sent
her to Brooklyn, New York, to work as a house servant.
For ten years after her escape from North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs
lived the tense and uncertain life of a fugitive slave. She found
Louisa in Brooklyn, secured a place for both children to live with
her in Boston, and went to work as a nursemaid to the baby daughter
of Mary Stace Willis, wife of the popular editor and poet,
Nathaniel Parker Willis. Norcom made several attempts to locate
Jacobs in New York, which forced her to keep on the move. In 1849
she took up an eighteen-month residence in Rochester, New York,
where she worked with her brother, John S. Jacobs, in a Rochester
antislavery reading room and bookstore above the offices of
Frederick Douglass's newspaper, The North Star. In Rochester Jacobs
met and began to confide in Amy Post, an abolitionist and
pioneering feminist who gently urged the fugitive slave mother to
consider making her story public. After the tumultuous response to
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Jacobs thought of enlisting the aid of
the novel's author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in getting her own story
published. But Stowe had little interest in any sort of creative
partnership with Jacobs. After receiving, early in 1852, the gift

of her freedom from Cornelia Grinnell Willis, the second wife of
her employer, Jacobs decided to write her autobiography herself.
In 1853 Jacobs took her first steps toward authorship, sending
several anonymous letters to the New York Tribune. In the first,
"Letter from a Fugitive Slave. Slaves Sold under Peculiar
Circumstances" (June 21, 1853), Jacobs broached the sexually
sensitive subject matter that would become the burden of her
autobiography -- the sexual abuse of slave women and their mothers'
attempts to protect them. By the summer of 1857 Jacobs had
completed what she called in a June 21 letter to Post "a true and
just account of my own life in Slavery." "There are some things
that I might have made plainer I know," Jacobs admitted to Post,
but, acknowledging her anxiety about telling her story to even as
sympathetic and supportive a friend as Post, Jacobs continued, "I
have left nothing out but what I thought the world might believe
that a Slave Woman was too willing to pour out—that she might gain
their sympathies." Still Jacobs hoped her book "might do something
for the Antislavery Cause" both in England and the United States.
To that end she engaged the editorial services of Lydia Maria
Child, a prominent white antislavery writer, who, as she put it in
an August 30, 1860 letter to Jacobs, "exercised my bump of mental
order" on the manuscript, before contracting with a Boston
publishing house, Thayer & Eldridge, to publish the book. Thayer &
Eldridge went bankrupt before Jacobs's autobiography could be
published, however. Persevering, Jacobs with the support of her
antislavery friends saw to the publication of Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl late in 1860 by a Boston printer. In 1861 a British
edition of Incidents, entitledThe Deeper Wrong; Or, Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl, appeared in London.
Praised by the antislavery press in the United States and Great
Britain, Incidents was quickly overshadowed by the gathering clouds
of civil war in America. Never reprinted in Jacobs's lifetime, it
remained in obscurity until the Civil Rights and Women's Movements
of the 1960s and 1970s spurred a reprint of Incidents in 1973. Not

until the extensive archival work of Jean Fagan Yellin did
Incidents begin to take its place as a major African American slave
narrative. Published in Yellin's admirable edition ofIncidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl (Harvard University Press, 1987), Jacobs's
correspondence with Child helps lay to rest the long-standing
charge against Incidents that it is at worst a fiction and at best
the product of Child's pen, not Jacobs's. Child's letters to Jacobs
and others make clear that her role as editor was no more than she
acknowledged in her introduction toIncidents: to ensure the orderly
arrangement and directness of the narrative, without adding
anything to the text or altering in any significant way Jacobs's
manner of recounting her story.
Harriet Jacobs was the first woman to author a fugitive slave
narrative in the United States. Yet she was never as celebrated as
Ellen Craft, a runaway from Georgia, who had become internationally
famous for the daring escape from slavery that she and her husband,
William, engineered in 1848, during which Ellen impersonated a male
slaveholder attended by her husband in the role of faithful slave.
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), the thrilling
narrative of the Crafts' flight from Savannah to Philadelphia, was
published under both of their names but has always been attributed
to William's hand. Harriet Jacobs's autobiography, by contrast, was
"written by herself," as the subtitle to the book proudly states.
Even more astonishing than the Crafts' story, Incidents represents
no less profoundly an African American woman's resourcefulness,
courage, and dauntless quest for freedom. Yet nowhere in Jacobs's
autobiography, not even on its title page, did its author disclose
her own identity. Instead, Jacobs called herself "Linda Brent" and
masked the important places and persons in her narrative in the
manner of a novelist, renaming Norcom "Dr. Flint" and Sawyer "Mr.
Sands" in her narrative. Despite her longing to speak out frankly
and fully, Jacobs dreaded writing candidly about the obscenities of
slavery, fear that disclosing these "foul secrets" would impute to
her the guilt that should have been reserved for those, like

Norcom, who hid behind such secrets. "I had no motive for secrecy
on my own account," Jacobs insists in her preface to Incidents, but
given the harrowing and sensational story she had to tell, the one-
time fugitive felt she had little alternative but to shield herself
from a readership whose understanding and empathy she could not
take for granted.
Jacobs's primary motive in writing Incidents was to address white
women of the North on behalf of thousands of "Slave mothers that
are still in bondage" in the South. The mother of two slave
children fathered by a white man, Jacobs faced a task considerably
more complicated than that of any African American woman author
before her. She wanted to indict the southern patriarchy for its
sexual tyranny over black women like herself. But she could not do
so without confessing with "sorrow and shame" her willing
participation in a liaison that produced two illegitimate children.
Resolved, she informs her female reader, "to tell you the truth. .
. let it cost me what it may," Jacobs fully acknowledges her
transgressions against conventional sexual morality when she was a
"slave girl." At the same time, however, Jacobs articulates a
bolder truth—that the morality of free white women has little
ethical relevance or authority when applied to the situation of
enslaved black women in the South.
White abolitionist propaganda in the antebellum era only rarely
discussed how slave women resisted sexual exploitation. Jacobs,
however, was determined to portray herself as an agent rather than
a victim, a woman motivated by a desire for freedom much stronger
than a fear of sexual retribution. "I knew what I did," Jacobs
admits in an extraordinarily candid explanation of her decision to
accept Sawyer as her lover, "and I did it with deliberate
calculation." But "there is something akin to freedom in having a
lover who has no control over you," Jacobs informs her reader. It
was a desire for freedom, rather than a white lover, Jacobs argues,
that ultimately impelled her affair with Sawyer. "I knew nothing
would enrage Dr. Flint so much as to know that I favored another. .

. . I thought he would revenge himself by selling me, and I was
sure my friend, Mr. Sands, would buy me." Such a "calculated" use
of sexuality as both an instrument of "revenge" against Norcom and
as a means to freedom via Sands may have unsettled Jacobs's
northern readers as much as her confessions of sexual
transgressions. But in the end, Jacobs claims, "in looking back,
calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought
not to be judged by the same standard as others." Whatever her
moral failings, Jacobs claims in recounting her sexual affairs as a
slave woman, the traditional ideals of the nineteenth-century "cult
of true womanhood" could not adequately address them.
Writing an unprecedented mixture of confession, self-justification,
and societal expose, Harriet Jacobs turned her autobiography into a
unique analysis of the myths and the realities that defined the
situation of the African American woman and her relationship to
nineteenth-century standards of womanhood. As a result, Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl occupies a crucial place in the history
of American women's literature in general and African American
women's literature in particular. Published in the North,Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl proved that until slavery was
overthrown, only expatriate southern women writers, such as Jacobs
and her contemporary, Angelina Grimke Weld, who left South Carolina
to speak out against slavery in the South, could write freely about
social problems in the South.
From 1862 to 1866 Jacobs devoted herself to relief efforts in and
around Washington, D.C., among former slaves who had become
refugees of the war. With her daughter Jacobs founded a school in
Alexandria, Virginia, which lasted from 1863 to 1865, when both
mother and daughter returned south to Savannah, Georgia, to engage
in further relief work among the freedmen and freedwomen. The
spring of 1867 found Jacobs back in Edenton, actively promoting the
welfare of the ex-slaves and reflecting in her correspondence on
"those I loved" and "their unfaltering love and devotion toward
myself and [my] children." This sense of dedication and solidarity

with those who had been enslaved kept Jacobs at work in the South
until racist violence ultimately drove her and Louisa back to the
Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in 1870 she opened a boarding
house. By the mid-1880s Jacobs had settled with Louisa in
Washington, D.C. Little is known about the last decade of her life.
Harriet Jacobs died in Washington, D.C. on March 7, 1897.
Suggested further reading: William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story
(1986); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood (1987); Joanne M.
Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography (1989); Dana D. Nelson,
The Word in Black and White (1992); Carla L. Peterson, "Doers of
the Word" African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North
(1830-1880) (1995); Deborah Garfield and Rafia Zafar, eds. Harriet
Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical
Essays (1996); and Jean Fagan Yellin,Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004).
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an
autobiographical novel published in 1861 by Harriet Ann Jacobs, an
escaped slave, under the pseudonym Linda Brent. The book is
strongly based on Jacobs' life as a slave and how she gained
freedom for herself and, later, for her children. Writing as a
black woman, Jacobs reconfigured the genres of slave narrative and
sentimental novels "to address race and gender
issues."[1] Specifically, she explores the struggles and sexual
abuse that female slaves faced onplantations and generally in
slavery, as well as their efforts to practice motherhood and
protect their children within slavery's constraints, where their
children might be sold away.
In the text, Jacobs makes it clear that she is speaking to
White women in the North who do not fully comprehend the evils of
slavery. She makes direct appeals to their humanity and although
she states that she’s not seeking sympathy for herself, it is
apparent that she is hoping to expand their knowledge and influence
their sentiments about slavery as an institution. Throughout the
text there is an evident tension of wanting readers to be able to

relate while simultaneously acknowledging that a complete
understanding is ultimately impossible for those who have never
been enslaved.
Jacobs began composing Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl after her escape to New York, while living and working at
Idlewild, theHudson River home of writer and publisher Nathaniel
Parker Willis.[2] Portions of the novel were published in serial
form in the New-York Tribune, owned and edited by Horace Greeley.
Jacobs' reports of sexual abuse were deemed too shocking for the
average newspaper reader of the day, and publication ceased before
the completion of the narrative.
Boston publishing house Phillips and Samson agreed to print
the work in book form if Jacobs could convince Willis or
abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe to provide a preface. She
refused to ask Willis for help and Stowe never responded to her
request. The Phillips and Samson company closed.[3] Jacobs
eventually signed an agreement with the Thayer &
Eldridge publishing house, and they requested a preface by
abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who agreed. Child also edited the
book, and the company introduced her to Jacobs. The two women
remained in contact for much of their remaining lives. Thayer &
Eldridge, however, declared bankruptcy before the narrative could
be published.
Plot summary
Born into slavery, Linda has happy years as a young child with
her brother, parents, and maternal grandmother, who are relatively
well-off slaves in good positions. It is not until her mother dies
that Linda even begins to understand that she is a slave. At the
age of six, she is sent to live in the big house under the extended
care of her mother's mistress, who treats her well and teaches her
to read. After a few years, this mistress dies and bequeaths Linda
to a relative.
Her new masters are cruel and neglectful, and Dr. Flint, the
father, takes an interest in Linda. He tries to force her into a

sexual relationship with him when she comes of age. The girl
resists his entreaties and maintains her distance.Knowing that
Flint will do anything to get his way, as a young woman Linda
consents to a relationship with a white neighbor, Mr. Sands, hoping
he can protect her from Flint. As a result of their relations,
Sands and Linda have two mixed-race children: Benjamin, often
called Benny, and Ellen. Because they were born to a slave mother,
they are considered slaves, under the principle of partus sequitur
ventrem, which had been part of southern slave law since the 17th
century. Linda is ashamed, but hopes this illegitimate relationship
will protect her from assault at the hands of Dr. Flint. Linda also
hopes that Flint would become angry enough to sell her to Sands,
but he refuses to do so. Instead, he sends Linda to his son's
plantation to be broken in as a field hand.
When Linda discovers that Benny and Ellen are also to be sent
to the fields, she makes a desperate plan. Escaping to the North
with two small children would be nearly impossible. Unwilling
either to submit to Dr. Flint's abuse or abandon her family, she
hides in the attic of her grandmother Aunt Martha's cabin. She
hopes that Dr. Flint, believing that she has fled to the North,
will sell her children rather than risk having them escape as well.
Linda is overjoyed when Dr. Flint sells Benny and Ellen to a slave
trader secretly representing Sands. Promising to free the children
one day, Sands assigns them to live with Aunt Martha. Linda becomes
physically debilitated by being confined to the tiny attic, where
she can neither sit nor stand. Her only pleasure is to watch her
children through a tiny peephole.
Mr. Sands marries and is elected as a congressman. When he
takes the slave girl Ellen to Washington, D.C., to be an eventual
companion for his newborn daughter, Linda realizes that he may
never free their children. Worried that he will eventually sell
them, she determines to escape with them to the North. But Dr.
Flint continues to hunt for her, and leaving the attic is still too
risky.

After seven years in the attic, Linda finally escapes to the
North by boat. Benny remains with Aunt Martha. Linda tracks down
Ellen, by then nine years old and living in Brooklyn, New York, in
the home of Sands’ cousin, Mrs. Hobbs. Linda is dismayed to see
Ellen is being treated as a slave, after the institution was
abolished in New York. She fears that Mrs. Hobbs will take Ellen
back to the South and put her beyond her mother's reach. Linda
finds work as a nursemaid for the Bruces, a family in New York City
who treat her very kindly.
Learning that Dr. Flint is still in pursuit, Linda flees
to Boston, where she is reunited with her son Benny, who had also
escaped. Dr. Flint claims that the sale of Benny and Ellen was
illegitimate, and Linda is terrified that he will re-enslave her
and her children. After a few years, Mrs. Bruce dies. Linda spends
some time living with her children in Boston. She spends a year in
England caring for Mr. Bruce's daughter, and for the first time in
her life enjoys freedom from racial prejudice. When Linda returns
to Boston, she sends Ellen to boarding school. Benny moves
to California with Linda's brother William, who had also escaped to
the North. Mr. Bruce remarries, and Linda takes a position caring
for their new baby. Dr. Flint dies, but his daughter, Emily, writes
to Linda to claim ownership of the fugitive slave.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is passed by Congress, making
Linda and her children extremely vulnerable to capture and re-
enslavement, as it requires cooperation by law enforcement and
citizens of free states. Emily Flint and her husband, Mr. Dodge,
arrive in New York to capture Linda. When the refugee goes into
hiding, the new Mrs. Bruce offers to purchase her freedom. At first
Linda refuses, unwilling to be bought and sold again, and makes
plans to follow Benny to California. Mrs. Bruce buys Linda's
freedom from Flint. Linda is grateful to Mrs. Bruce, but expresses
disgust at the institution that required such a transaction. Linda
notes that she has not yet realized her dream of making a home with
her children.

The book closes with two testimonials to its accuracy, one
from Amy Post, a white abolitionist, and the other from George W.
Lowther, a black anti-slavery writer.
Character analysis
Linda Brent – The protagonist, and a pseudonym for Harriet
Jacobs. At the start of the story, Linda is unaware of her status
as a slave due to her first kind masters, who taught her how to
read and write. She faces harassment by her subsequent masters, the
Flints. Linda learns along the way how to defend herself against
her masters. She uses psychological warfare to avoid the advances
of Dr. Flint. Jacobs reveals in the beginning of the book that
there were aspects of her story that she could not bear to write.
She is torn between her desire for personal freedom and
responsibility to her family, especially her children Benny and
Ellen.
Dr. Flint – Linda's master, enemy and would-be lover. He has
the legal right to do anything he wants to Linda, but wants to
seduce her rather than take her by force in rape. Throughout the
book, Linda constantly rebels against him and refuses any sexual
dealings. He becomes enraged, obsessing about breaking her spirit.
Dr. Flint never recognizes that Linda is a full human being. Dr.
Flint objectifies Linda as a woman slave and consistently fights
with his wife.
Aunt Martha–Linda's maternal grandmother and close friend.
Religious and patient, she is saddened about the treatment of her
children and grandchildren by their white masters. She grieves when
her loved ones escape to freedom, as she knows they will never meet
again. Family to her must be preserved even at the cost of freedom
and happiness. Aunt Martha stands up for herself, speaking to the
Flints out of her dignity. She is the only slave whom Dr. Flint
respects.
Mrs. Flint–Linda's mistress and Dr. Flint's wife. Suspecting a
sexual relationship between Linda and her husband, she treats the
girl viciously. Though a church woman, she is brutal and

insensitive to her slaves, representing the corruption caused by
slavery. She and her husband fight about Linda, as he protects her
from corporal punishment by Mrs. Flint.
Mr. Sands–Linda's white sexual partner and the father of her
children, Benny and Ellen. Though somewhat kindly, Sands has no
real love toward his two slave children. But he serves as Linda's
portal to partial freedom, and the two can use each other. Sands
breaks promises to Linda and he eventually doesn't talk to her
anymore. He eventually has another child by his wife and treats
that child with more affection than Benny and Ellen.[12]
Fictional characters
Harriet Jacobs uses fictional names to protect the identities
of persons and alters events and characters for dramatic effect.
The characters are believed by scholars to generally correspond to
Jacobs and people in her life.
Linda Brent (stand for Harriet Jacobs), the book's protagonist and
a pseudonym for the author.
William Brent is John Jacobs: Linda's brother, to whom she is
close. William's escape from Mr. Sands shows that even a privileged
slave desires freedom above all else.
Ruth Nash is Margaret Horniblow.
Emily Flint is Mary Matilda Norcom, Dr. Flint's daughter and
Linda's legal master.
Dr. Flint is Dr. James Norcom. Based on Harriet Jacobs' master, the
character of Dr. Flint is drawn with emphasis on his villainy.
Aunt Martha is Molly Horniblow. She is one of the narrative's most
complex characters, representing an ideal of domestic life and
maternal love. She works tirelessly to buy her children's and
grandchildren's freedom.
Mr. Sands is Samuel Tredwell Sawyer; he is Linda's white lover and
the father of her children. After arranging to buy the children, he
repeatedly breaks promises to Linda to free them.
Benny Sands is Joseph Sawyer.
Ellen Sands is Louisa Sawyer.

Mr. Bruce is Nathaniel Parker Willis.
Gertrude Bruce is Cornelia Grinnel Willis.

Frederick Douglass was born on a plantation on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland around 1818. He died 77
years later in his home at Cedar Hill, high above
Washington, DC. In his journey from captive slave to
internationally renowned activist, Douglass changed
how Americans thought about race, slavery, and
American democracy. Since the early 1800s Douglass'
life has been a source of inspiration and hope for millions. He has
also been an ever present challenge, demanding that American
citizens live up to their highest ideals and make the United States
a land of liberty and equality for all.
Slavery and Escape
Douglass began his life on a plantation belonging to Edward
Lloyd in February, 1818. He was named Frederick Bailey after his
mother (Harriett Bailey), though he only met her three or four
times in his life. Around the age of eight he was sent to live with
one of his owner's relatives in Baltimore, Maryland. It was while
living in Baltimore that he was mistakenly taught the first several
letters of the alphabet. Those few letters opened a new world to
him and began his lifelong love of language.At fifteen, the now
literate Douglass was returned to the Eastern shore to work as a
field hand. Here the increasingly independent teenager educated
other slaves, resisted efforts to beat him, and planned a failed
escape attempt.Three years later, on September 3, 1838, Douglass
disguised himself as a sailor, and carrying a friend's passport,
boarded a northbound train from Baltimore.He arrived in New York
City and declared himself a free man.
Abolition Work
After escaping from slavery Douglass changed his name to avoid
being recaptured and turned his efforts to helping those still held
in bondage. Douglass travelled around Masachusettes speaking about
his experiences with slavery and the need to destroy it. One of the
most prominent abolitionists in Ameica,William Lloyd Garisson heard

Douglass and invited him to join the Massachusetts Anti-
Slavery Society. Douglass was soon touring across the North
speaking against slavery and becoming one of the country's finest
orators.Douglass was such an impressive speaker and he broke so
many of his audiences' preconceptions that some people began to
doubt he was truly a fugitive slave.To prove them wrong Douglass
wrote his first autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass (1845), in which he revealed his original name,
his owner's names, and where he was born. The book was wildly
popular, but with his identity known Douglass was in danger of
being returned to slavery. Once again he had to flee, this time to
England, Scotland, and Ireland.
While in the British Isles Douglass continued speaking against
slavery. British supporters were so impressed with Douglass that
they purchased his freedom. After more than two years abroad
Douglass was able to return to the United States a legally free
man. He settled in Rochester New York, a hotbed of the abolitionist
and women's rights movements. Using additional money raised in
Britain, Douglass bought a printing press and began publishing The
North Star newspaper. He now proudly referred to himself as "Mr.
Editor."
Civil War
In 1861 tensions over slavery erupted into civil war. Douglass
welcomed the conflict as the cataclysmic event needed to wipe
slavery from America. As always, he acted as the nation's
conscience, arguing that the war was about more than union and
state's rights. It was, he said, about a new birth of freedom, a
great step towards the nation promised in the Declaration of
Independence.

Douglass knew that this new freedom had to be won both on and off
the battlefield. Though he was too old to serve in battle, himself
he recruited other African Americans to fight in the Union Army,
including two of his sons, who served with the famous 54th
Massachusetts. Away from the fighting Douglass continued to write
and speak against slavery, arguing for a higher purpose to the war.
He met with Abraham Lincoln to advocate for African American troops
and to encourage Lincoln to see the war as a chance to transform
the country into a more perfect nation. Douglass' influence was
crucial to Lincoln's evolution as a thinker over the course of the
war. This influence can be seen in the Gettysburg Address and
Lincoln's second inaugural speech.
Post Civil War
Following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of
slavery new possibilities opened up for Douglass.He moved from
Rochester to Washington, D.C., eventually buying the home at Cedar
Hill. During this time he served as the U.S. Marshall for the
District of Columbia, the District's Registrar of Deeds, and the
U.S. Minister to Haiti and Charge d'Affairs to the Dominican
Republic. Despite his victories and successes, Douglass still had
many battles to fight. African Americans hold on their newly won
civil rights remained tenuous and women were still not allowed to
vote. He continued to work to expand civil rights in the country
until his death in 1895.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an 1845 memoir
and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and former
slave Frederick Douglass. It is generally held to be the most
famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during
the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events
of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential
pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early
19th century in the United States.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass encompasses eleven
chapters that recount Douglass' life as a slave and his ambition to
become a free man.
Chapters 1–4
Douglass begins by explaining that he does not know the date
of his birth (February 3, 1818), and that his mother died when he
was 7 years old. He has very few memories of her (children were
commonly separated from their mothers), only of the rare night time
visit. He thinks his father is a white man, possibly his owner. At
a very early age he sees his Aunt Hester being whipped. Douglass
details the cruel interaction that occurs between slaves and slave
holders, as well as how slaves are supposed to behave in the
presence of their masters, and that even when Douglass says that
fear is what kept many slaves where they were, when they tell the
truth they are punished by their owners.
Chapters 5–7
At this point in the Narrative, Douglass is moved
to Baltimore, Maryland. This is rather important for him because he
believes that if he had not been moved, he would have remained a
slave his entire life. He even starts to have hope for a better
life in the future. At this point, he discusses his new mistress,
Mrs. Sophia Auld, who begins as a very kind woman but eventually
turns cruel. Douglass learns the alphabet and how to spell small
words from this woman, but her husband, Mr. Auld, disapproves, and
states that if slaves could read, they will not be fit to be a
slave, being unmanageable and sad. Upon hearing why Mr. Auld
disapproves of slaves being taught how to read, Douglass realizes
the importance of reading and the possibilities that this skill
could help him. He takes it upon himself to learn how to read and
learn all he can, but at times, this newfound skill torments him.
Douglass then gains an understanding of the word abolition and
develops the idea to run away to the North. He also learns how to
write and how to read well.
Chapters 8–9

At the age of ten or eleven, Douglass' master dies and his
property is left to be divided between his son and daughter. The
slaves are valued alongside with the livestock, causing Douglass to
develop a new hatred of slavery. He feels lucky when he is sent
back to Baltimore to live with the family of Master Hugh.He is then
moved through a few more situations before he is sent to St.
Michael's. His regret at not having attempted to run away is
evident, but on his voyage he makes a mental note that he traveled
in the North-Easterly direction and considers this information to
be of extreme importance. For some time, he lives with Master
Thomas Auld who is particularly cruel, even after attending
a Methodist camp. He is pleased when he eventually is lent to Mr.
Covey for a year, simply because he would be fed. Mr. Covey is
known as a "negro-breaker," who breaks the will of slaves.
Chapters 10–11
While under the control of Mr. Covey, Frederick Douglass bit his
hand and has an especially hard time at the tasks required of him.
He is harshly whipped almost on a weekly basis, apparently due to
his awkwardness. He is worked and was beaten to exhaustion, which
finally causes him to collapse one day while working in the fields.
Because of this, he is brutally beaten once more by Covey, and
eventually complains to Thomas Auld, who ultimately sends him back
to Covey. One day, Covey attempts to tie up Douglass, but he fights
back. After a long, two-hour physical battle, Douglass ultimately
conquers. After this fight, he is never beaten again. Douglass is
not punished by the law, which is believed to be due to the fact
that Covey cherishes his reputation as a "negro-breaker ," which
would be jeopardized if others knew what happened. He is sent to
live on another plantation where he befriends other slaves and
teaches them how to read. He and the others make a plan to escape,
but before doing so, they are caught and Douglass is put in jail.
After he was released 2 years later, he is sent to Baltimore once
more, but this time to learn how to trade. He becomes an apprentice
in a shipyard where he is abused by several white people; then 4

whites nearly gouge out his left eye. When this happens, Douglass
goes to Master Hugh, who is kind regarding this situation and
refuses to let Douglass return to the shipyard. Master Hugh tries
to find a lawyer but all refuse, saying they can only do something
for a white person. Sophia Auld, who had turned cruel, felt pity
for Douglass and tended to the wound at his left eye until he is
healed. At this point, Douglass is employed to be a caulker and
receives wages, but is forced to give every cent to Master Auld in
due time. Douglass eventually finds his own job and plans the date
in which he will escape to the North. He succeeds but does not give
details of how he did so in order to protect those who helped him,
and to ensure the possibility of other slaves escape. At this point
Douglass unites with his fiancée and begins working as his own
master. He ultimately attends an anti-slavery convention and
supports the cause from then on.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was born and lived
nearly all his life in Concord, Massachusetts, a
small town about twenty miles west of Boston. He
received his education at the public school in
Concord and at the private Concord Academy. Proving
to be a better scholar than his more fun-loving and
popular elder brother John, he was sent to Harvard.
He did well there and, despite having to drop out for several
months for financial and health reasons, was graduated in the top
half of his class in 1837.
Thoreau's graduation came at an inauspicious time. In 1837,
America was experiencing an economic depression and jobs were not
plentiful. Furthermore, Thoreau found himself temperamentally
unsuited for three of the four usual professions open to Harvard
graduates: the ministry, the law, and medicine. The fourth,
teaching, was one he felt comfortable with, since both of his elder
siblings, Helen and John, were already teachers. He was hired as
the teacher of the Concord public school, but resigned after only
two weeks because of a dispute with his superintendent over how to

discipline the children. For a while he and John considered
seeking their fortunes in California, but at last he fell back onto
working in his father's pencil factory.
Thoreau's family participated in the "quiet desperation" of
commerce and industry through the pencil factory owned and managed
by his father. Thoreau family pencils, produced behind the family
house on Main Street, were generally recognized as America's best
pencils, largely because of Henry's research into German pencil-
making techniques.
In 1838, he decided to start his own school in Concord,
eventually asking John to help him. The two brothers worked well
together and vacationed together during holidays. In September
1839, they spent a memorable week together on a boating trip up the
Concord and Merrimack rivers to Mount Washington in New Hampshire.
About the same time both brothers became romantically interested in
Ellen Sewall, a frequent visitor to Concord from Cape Cod. In the
fall of the next year, both brothers -- first John and then Henry -
- proposed marriage to her. But because of her father's objections
to the Thoreaus' liberal religious views, Ellen rejected both
proposals.
When John endured a lengthy illness in 1841, the school became
too much for Henry to handle alone, so he closed it. He returned to
work in the pencil factory but was soon invited to work as a live-
in handyman in the home of his mentor, neighbor, and friend, Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
Emerson was by then already one of the most famous American
philosophers and men of letters. Since Thoreau's graduation from
Harvard, he had become a protégé of his famous neighbor and an
informal student of Emerson's Transcendental ideas.
Transcendentalism was an American version of Romantic Idealism, a
dualistic Neoplatonic view of the world divided into the material
and the spiritual. For Emerson, "Mind is the only reality, of which
all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature,
literature, history, are only subjective phenomena." For the

Transcendentalist, the secret of successful living was to hold
oneself above material concerns as much as possible and focus on
the spiritual. Thoreau must have imbibed Transcendentalism through
almost every pore during his two years living with Emerson, though
he would modify it to suit his own temperament by granting nature
more reality than Emerson did.
During his stay with Emerson, Thoreau developed ambitions of
becoming a writer and got help from Emerson in getting some poems
and essays published in the Transcendental journal, The Dial. But
life in his parents' home held problems for the budding writer.
Work in the pencil factory was tedious and tiring, and, since his
mother took in boarders, there was little quiet or privacy in the
house. Remembering a summer visit to the retreat cabin of college
friend Charles Stearns Wheeler, Thoreau developed a plan to build
such a house for himself where he could find privacy to write.
In 1845, he received permission from Emerson to use a piece of land
that Emerson owned on the shore of Walden Pond. He bought building
supplies and a chicken coop (for the boards), and built himself a
small house there, moving in on the Fourth of July. He had two main
purposes in moving to the pond: to write his first book, A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as a tribute to his late brother
John; and to conduct an economic experiment to see if it were
possible to live by working one day and devoting the other six to
more Transcendental concerns, thus reversing the Yankee habit of
working six days and resting one. His nature study and the writing
of Walden would develop later during his stay at the pond. He began
writing Walden in 1846 as a lecture in response to the questions of
townspeople who were curious about what he was doing out at the
pond, but his notes soon grew into his second book.
Thoreau stayed in the house at Walden Pond for two years, from
July 1845 to September 1847.Walden condenses the experiences of
those two years into one year for artistic unity. During these two
years he also spent one night in jail, an incident which occurred
in the summer of 1846 and which became the subject of his essay

"Resistance to Civil Government" (later known as "Civil
Disobedience”). That same year he also took a trip to Maine to see
and climb Mount Katahdin, a place with a much wilder nature than he
could find around Concord.
In the years after leaving Walden Pond, Thoreau published A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854).
A Week sold poorly, leading Thoreau to hold off publication
ofWalden, so that he could revise it extensively to avoid the
problems, such as looseness of structure and a preaching tone
unalleviated by humor, that had put readers off in the first book.
Walden was a modest success: it brought Thoreau good reviews,
satisfactory sales, and a small following of fans.
Thoreau returned to the Emerson home and lived there for two years,
while Emerson was on a lecture tour in Europe. For much of his
remaining years, he rented a room in his parents' home. He made
his living by working in the pencil factory, by doing surveying, by
lecturing occasionally, and by publishing essays in newspapers and
journals. His income, however, was always very modest, and his main
concerns were his daily afternoon walks in the Concord woods, the
keeping of a private journal of his nature observations and ideas,
and the writing and revision of essays for publication.
Thoreau was an ardent and outspoken abolitionist, serving as a
conductor on the underground railroad to help escaped slaves make
their way to Canada. He wrote strongly-worded attacks on the
Fugitive Slave Law ("Slavery in Massachusetts") and on the
execution of John Brown.
His trips to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod provided material
for travel essays published first in journals; these were
eventually collected into posthumous books. Other excursions took
him to Canada and, near the end of his life, to Minnesota.
In May 1862, Thoreau died of the tuberculosis with which he had
been periodically plagued since his college years. He left behind
large unfinished projects, including a comprehensive record of
natural phenomena around Concord, extensive notes on American

Indians, and many volumes of his daily journal jottings. At his
funeral, his friend Emerson said, “The country knows not yet, or in
the least part, how great a son it has lost. … His soul was made
for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the
capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever
there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”
Washington Irving, (born April 3, 1783, New York,
N.Y., U.S.—died Nov. 28, 1859, Tarrytown,
N.Y.), writer called the “first American man of
letters.” He is best known for the short stories
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”
The favourite and last of 11 children of an austere
Presbyterian father and a genial Anglican mother, young,
frail Irving grew up in an atmosphere of indulgence. He escaped a
college education, which his father required of his older sons, but
read intermittently at the law, notably in the office of Josiah
Ogden Hoffman, with whose pretty daughter Matilda he early fell in
love. He wrote a series of whimsically satirical essays over the
signature of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., published in Peter Irving’s
newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, in 1802–03. He made several trips
up the Hudson, another into Canada for his health, and took an
extended tour of Europe in 1804–06.
On his return he passed the bar examination late in 1806 and soon
set up as a lawyer. But during 1807–08 his chief occupation was to
collaborate with his brother William and James K. Paulding in the
writing of a series of 20 periodical essays entitled Salmagundi.
Concerned primarily with passing phases of contemporary society,
the essays retain significance as an index to the social milieu.
His A History of New York . . . by Diedrich
Knickerbocker (1809) was a comichistory of the Dutch regime in New
York, prefaced by a mock-pedantic account of the world from
creation onward. Its writing was interrupted in April 1809 by the
sudden death of Matilda Hoffman, as grief incapacitated him. In

1811 he moved to Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist for the Irving
brothers’ hardware-importing firm, but his life seemed aimless for
some years. He prepared an American edition of Thomas Campbell’s
poems, edited the Analectic Magazine, and acquired a staff
colonelcy during the War of 1812. In 1815 he went to Liverpool to
look after the interests of his brothers’ firm. In London he
met Sir Walter Scott, who encouraged him to renewed effort. The
result was The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent(1819–20), a
collection of stories and essays that mix satire and whimsicality
with fact and fiction. Most of the book’s 30-odd pieces concern
Irving’s impressions of England, but six chapters deal with
American subjects. Of these, the tales “The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” have been called the first American
short stories. They are both Americanized versions of German
folktales. The main character of “Rip Van Winkle” is a henpecked
husband who sleeps for 20 years and awakes as an old man to find
his wife dead, his daughter happily married, and America now an
independent country. The tremendous success ofThe Sketch Book in
both England and the United States assured Irving that he could
live by his pen. In 1822 he produced Bracebridge Hall, a sequel
to The Sketch Book. He traveled in Germany, Austria, France, Spain,
the British Isles, and later in his own country.
Early in 1826 he accepted the invitation of Alexander H.
Everett to attach himself to the American legation in Spain, where
he wrote his Columbus (1828), followed by The Companions of
Columbus (1831). Meanwhile, Irving had become absorbed in the
legends of the Moorish past and wrote A Chronicle of the Conquest
of Granada (1829) and The Alhambra (1832), a Spanish counterpart
of The Sketch Book.
After a 17-year absence Irving returned to New York in 1832,
where he was warmly received. He made a journey west and produced
in rapid succession A Tour of the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836),
and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837). Except for four
years (1842–46) as minister to Spain, Irving spent the remainder of

his life at his home, “Sunnyside,” in Tarrytown, on the Hudson
River, where he devoted himself to literary pursuits.
Irving's other works include Bracebridge Hall (1822), Tales of
a Traveller (1824), A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829),
Oliver Goldsmith (1849), and Life of Washington (5 volumes, 1855-
1859).
Works
Title
Publication
date
Written As Genre
Letters of
Jonathan Oldstyle
1802 Jonathan
Oldstyle
Observational
Letters
Salmagundi 1807–1808
Launcelot
Langstaff, Will
Wizard
Satire
A History of New
York
1809 Diedrich
Knickerbocker
Satire
The Sketch Book of
Geoffrey Crayon,
Gent.
1819–1820 Geoffrey Crayon Short
stories/Essays
Bracebridge Hall 1822 Geoffrey Crayon Short
stories/Essays
Tales of a
Traveller
1824 Geoffrey Crayon Short
stories/Essays
A History of the
Life and Voyages
of Christopher
Columbus
1828 Washington
Irving
Biography/History
Chronicle of the
Conquest of
Granada
1829 Fray Antonio
Agapida[114]
Romantic history

Voyages and
Discoveries
of the Companions
of Columbus
1831 Washington
Irving
Biography/History
Tales of the
Alhambra
1832 "The Author of
the Sketch
Book"
Short
stories/Travel
The Crayon
Miscellany[115]
1835 Geoffrey Crayon Short stories
Astoria 1836 Washington
Irving
Biography/History
The Adventures of
Captain Bonneville
1837 Washington
Irving
Biography/Romantic
History
The Life of Oliver
Goldsmith
1840
(revised
1849)
Washington
Irving
Biography
Biography and
Poetical Remains
of the Late
Margaret Miller
Davidson
1841 Washington
Irving
Biography
Lives of Mahomet
and His Successors
1850 Washington
Irving
Biography
Wolfert's Roost 1855 Geoffrey Crayon
Diedrich
Knickerbocker
Washington
Irving
Biography
The Life of George
Washington (5
volumes)
1855–1859 Washington
Irving
Biography

"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by American
author Washington Irving published in 1819 as well as the name of
the story's fictional protagonist. Written while Irving was living
in Birmingham, England, it was part of a collection entitled The
Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Although the story is set
in New York's Catskill Mountains, Irving later admitted, "When I
wrote the story, I had never been on the Catskills."[1]
Summary
The story of Rip Van Winkle is set in the years before and
after the American Revolutionary War. In a pleasant village, at the
foot of New York's Catskill Mountains, lives kindly Rip Van Winkle,
a colonial British-American villager of Dutch ancestry. Van Winkle
enjoys solitary activities in the wilderness, but he is also loved
by all in town—especially the children to whom he tells stories and
gives toys. However, he tends to shirk hard work, to his nagging
wife's dismay, which has caused his home and farm to fall into
disarray.
One autumn day, to escape his wife's nagging, Van Winkle
wanders up the mountains with his dog, Wolf. Hearing his name
called out, Rip sees a man wearing antiquated Dutch clothing; he is
carrying a keg up the mountain and requires help. Together, they
proceed to a hollow in which Rip discovers the source of thunderous
noises: a group of ornately dressed, silent, bearded men who are
playing nine-pins. Rip does not ask who they are or how they know
his name. Instead, he begins to drink some of their moonshine and
soon falls asleep.
He awakes to discover shocking changes. His musket is rotting
and rusty, his beard is a foot long, and his dog is nowhere to be
found. Van Winkle returns to his village where he recognizes no
one. He discovers that his wife has died and that his close friends
have fallen in a war or moved away. He gets into trouble when he
proclaims himself a loyal subject of King George III, not aware
that the American Revolution has taken place. King George's
portrait in the inn has been replaced with one of George

Washington. Rip Van Winkle is also disturbed to find another man
called Rip Van Winkle. It is his
son, now grown up.
Rip Van Winkle learns the men he met in the mountains are
rumored to be the ghosts of Hendrick (Henry) Hudson's crew, which
had vanished long ago. Rip learns he has been away from the village
for at least twenty years. However, an old resident recognizes him
and Rip's grown daughter takes him in. He resumes his usual
idleness, and his strange tale is solemnly taken to heart by the
Dutch settlers. Other henpecked men wish they could have shared in
Rip's good luck and had the luxury of sleeping through the
hardships of the American Revolution.
Characters in the story of Rip Van Winkle
Character Description
Rip Van
Winkle
A henpecked husband who loathes 'profitable labor'.
Meek, easygoing, never-do-well resident of the
village who wanders off to the mountains and meets
strange men playing ninepins.
Dame Van
Winkle
Rip Van Winkle's cantankerous and nagging wife.
Rip Van
Winkle, Jr.
Rip Van Winkle's never-do-well son.
Judith
Gardenier
Rip Van Winkle's married daughter. She takes her
father in after he returns from his sleep.
Derrick Van
Bummel
The local schoolmaster and later a member
of Congress.
Nicholas
Vedder
Landlord of the local inn where menfolk congregate.
Van Schaick The local parson.
Jonathan
Doolittle
Owner of the Union Hotel, the establishment that
replaced the village inn.

Wolf
Rip's faithful dog, who does not recognize him when
he wakes up
Man carrying
keg up the
mountain
The ghost of Englishman Henry Hudson, explorer of the
Hudson River.
Ninepin
bowlers
The ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crewmen from his ship,
the Half-Moon. They share purple magic liquor with
Rip Van Winkle and play a game of ninepins.
Brom Dutcher
Neighbor of Rip who went off to war while Rip was
sleeping.
Old woman
Woman who identifies Rip when he returns to the
village after his sleep.
Peter
Vanderdonk
The oldest resident of the village. He confirms Rip’s
identity and cites evidence indicating Rip’s strange
tale is true.
Mr.
Gardenier
Judith Gardenier’s husband, a farmer and crabby
villager.
Rip Van
Winkle III
Rip Van Winkle’s infant grandchild. His mother is
Judith Gardenier.
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a short story by American
author Washington Irving, contained in his collection of 34 essays
and short stories entitled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon,
Gent. Written while Irving was living abroad in Birmingham,
England, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was first published in 1820.
Along with Irving's companion piece "Rip Van Winkle", "The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow" is among the earliest examples of American
fiction with enduring popularity, especially during the Halloween
season.
Plot
From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar
character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original

Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by name
of Sleepy Hollow ... A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over
the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.
—Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The story is set in 1790 in the countryside around
the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town (historical Tarrytown, New
York), in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is
renowned for its ghosts and the haunting atmosphere that pervades
the imaginations of its inhabitants and visitors. Some residents
say this town was bewitched during the early days of the Dutch
settlement. Other residents say an old Native American chief, the
wizard of his tribe, held his powwows here before the country was
discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. The most infamous spectre in
the Hollow is the Headless Horseman, said to be the ghost of
a Hessian trooper who had his head shot off by a stray cannonball
during "some nameless battle" of the American Revolutionary War,
and who "rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his
head".
The "Legend" relates the tale of Ichabod Crane, a lean, lanky
and extremely superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut, who
competes with Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt, the town rowdy, for
the hand of 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and sole
child of a wealthy farmer, Baltus Van Tassel. Crane, a Yankee and
an outsider, sees marriage to Katrina as a means of procuring Van
Tassel's extravagant wealth. Bones, the local hero, vies with
Ichabod for Katrina's hand, playing a series of pranks on the
jittery schoolmaster, and the fate of Sleepy Hollow's
fortune weighs in the balance for some time. The tension between
the three is soon brought to a head. On a placid autumn night, the
ambitious Crane attends a harvest party at the Van Tassels'
homestead. He dances, partakes in the feast, and listens to ghostly
legends told by Brom and the locals, but his true aim is to propose
to Katrina after the guests leave. His intentions, however, are
ill-fated.

After having failed to secure Katrina's hand, Ichabod rides
home "heavy-hearted and crestfallen" through the woods between Van
Tassel's farmstead and the Sleepy Hollow settlement. As he passes
several purportedly haunted spots, his active imagination is
engorged by the ghost stories told at Baltus' harvest party. After
nervously passing under a lightning-stricken tulip tree purportedly
haunted by the ghost of British spy Major André, Ichabod encounters
a cloaked rider at an intersection in a menacing swamp. Unsettled
by his fellow traveler's eerie size and silence, the teacher is
horrified to discover that his companion's head is not on his
shoulders, but on his saddle. In a frenzied race to the bridge
adjacent to the Old Dutch Burying Ground, where the Hessian is said
to "vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone"
upon crossing it, Ichabod rides for his life, desperately goading
his temperamental plow horse down the Hollow. However, to the
pedagogue's horror, the ghoul clambers over the bridge, rears his
horse, and hurls his severed head into Ichabod's terrified face.
The next morning, Ichabod has mysteriously disappeared from
town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Bones, who was said "to look
exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related."
Indeed, the only relics of the schoolmaster's flight are his
wandering horse, trampled saddle, discarded hat, and a
mysterious shattered pumpkin. Although the nature of the Headless
Horseman is left open to interpretation, the story implies that the
ghost was really Brom (an agile stunt rider) in disguise. Irving's
narrator concludes, however, by stating that the old Dutch wives
continue to promote the belief that Ichabod was "spirited away by
supernatural means," and a legend develops around
hisdisappearance and sightings of his melancholy spirit.

On January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was born in
Boston, Massachusetts. Poe’s father and mother, both
professional actors, died before the poet was three
years old, and John and Frances Allan raised him as
a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a
prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best
boarding schools and later to the University of
Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one
year of school, however, he was forced to leave the university when
Allan refused to pay Poe’s gambling debts.Poe returned briefly to
Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, he
moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first
collection of poems,Tamerlane, and Other Poems, was published that
year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf,
Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Neither volume received significant
critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was
admitted to the United States Military Academy, but he was again
forced to leave for lack of financial support. He then moved into
the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia in
Baltimore, Maryland.
Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this
time, and, in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary
Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin
Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was fourteen years old
at the time. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of
literary journals including the Burton’s Gentleman’s
Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway
Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he
established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor.
He published some of his best-known stories and poems, including
“The Fall of the House of Usher," “The Tell-Tale Heart," “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue," and “The Raven.” After Virginia’s death
from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe’s lifelong struggle with depression
and alcoholism worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849

and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For unknown
reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he was found
in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of
“acute congestion of the brain.” Evidence by medical practitioners
who reopened the case has shown that Poe may have been suffering
from rabies.
Poe’s work as an editor, a poet, and a critic had a profound
impact on American and international literature. His stories mark
him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction.
Many anthologies credit him as the “architect” of the modern short
story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on
the effect of style and structure in a literary work; as such, he
has been seen as a forerunner to the “art for art’s sake” movement.
French Symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as a
literary precursor. Baudelairespent nearly fourteen years
translating Poe into French. Today, Poe is remembered as one of the
first American writers to become a major figure in world
literature.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
Poems (1831)
The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)
Fiction
Berenice (1835)
Ligeia (1838)
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1939)
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
The Black Cat (1843)
The Tell-Tale Heart(1843)
The Purloined Letter(1845)

The Cask of Amontillado (1846)
The Oval Portrait (1850)
The Narrative of Arthut Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (/ˈhɔːˌθɔrn/; born Nathaniel
Hathorne; July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) was an American
novelist and short story writer. He was born in 1804
in Salem, Massachusetts, to Nathaniel Hathorne and
the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors
include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in
the Salem witch trials who never repented of his act
-ionsNathaniel later added a "w" to make his name "Hawthorne" in
order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821,
was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824,[1] and graduated in 1825.
Hawthorne published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in
1828; he later tried to suppress it, feeling it was not equal to
the standard of his later work.[2] He published several short
stories in various periodicals, which he collected in 1837
as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia
Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm,
a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The
couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later
moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in
Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a
succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne
and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860.
Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and
their three children.
Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works
featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction
works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more
specifically, Dark romanticism. His themes often center on the
inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral
messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works

English and American Literature for English 15

English and American Literature for English 15

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English and American Literature for English 15