A History of the American People

under a rich foster-father who starved him of money; rebelled and ran away; got into West Point
and was discharged for gross neglect of duty;' became a journalist, then an editor, but was sacked for drunkenness; nearly starved to death in a garret; married his thirteen-year-old cousin probably incestuously (that is without getting a license); led a vie de boheme, being hired and fired many times, by many publications; got into trouble with women; tried suicide; mourned his wife who died of TB; tried to give up drink; fell in love again and planned marriage; on the way north to bring his bride to the wedding at Richmond (where he was living), he stopped in Baltimore and, five days later, was discovered in a delirious condition near a saloon used as a voting-place-it is possible he was captured in a drunken condition by a mob who used him, as was then common, for the purpose of multiple voting. Poe aroused rage, derision, contempt, and indignation among right-thinking fellow- Americans. Emerson dismissed him asthe jingle Man.' James Russell Lowell (1819-91), his
younger poetic contemporary, found his work 'three-fifths genius, two-fifths sheer fudge.' But,
like Longfellow, though for wholly different purposes, he stuck thoughts, and still more images,
into the minds not just of Americans but of people all over the world. Whether writing short
stories or poems, his vivid and often horrific imagination worked powerfully on conscious and
subconscious alike: The Pit and the Pendulum',The Raven' (for which he was paid $2), The Premature Burial,'The Gold Bug,' The Bells,'The Fall of the House of Usher,' The Murders in the Rue Morgue,'A Descent into the Maelstrom,' 'Annabel Lee,' A Dream within a Dream'- there are ineffaceable images here. His influence was enormous: he was the first American writer who had a major and continuing impact on Europe. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Bierce, Hart Crane, Swinburne, Rossetti, Rilke-and many others-felt his transforming fruitfulness. In some ways Poe seemed very unAmerican. Baudelaire wrote:America was Poe's prison.'
Lacan and Derrida, while purloining him, deAmericanized him also. But it can equally well be
argued that Poe was very American: that he both reflected and inspired some of the horrors and
fantasies of life in the continental country which was emerging in his day, its mystery and
violence and contrasts and silences: also its crowds and loneliness. Cranky and melancholy, a
solitary man in a vast continent of space, nostalgic for a smaller, warmer world, but also looking
ahead to the future marvels and horrors, Poe did indeed respond to the Gothick side of American
life, which grew fast in the 19th century. His work was also a huge depository of ideas and
dreams, later to be mined by generations of American popular writers, especially authors of
detective stories and crime-thrillers, but also the scriptwriters of Hollywood horror-movies and
cartoons. The world of Walt Disney, without the germinating seeds of Poe, would have been
tamer, safer, and less threatening. In short, Poe arrived at a time when American culture was
suddenly becoming complex, difficult to define, moving out of easy control, and immeasurably
more exciting-and he added fundamentally to this new excitement.
It is notable in Poe's work that the hidden recesses of the mind, what might be called the
psychological depths, are for the first time broached in American literature. But it is in the novels
of Nathaniel Hawthorne that they begin to be thoroughly explored. In a sense Hawthorne was as
American as it is possible to be. He was born in Salem. He came from a prominent Puritan
family, who spelt the name Hathorne and who provided one of the judges at the witchcraft trials.
His father was a New England sea-captain who died young of yellow fever, leaving Hawthorne's
mother to lead a long life of eccentric seclusion, which had a profound effect on the young
writer's own tender and bizarre imagination. All his life Hawthorne felt overshadowed by his
puritan forebears, and by the guilt and secrecy they created, so his genealogy was a grave burden
to him, which he sought to exorcize in his novels, the first to reflect the workings of the