1840–1860: American Renaissance
Transcendentalism and American Gothic (dark romantics)
Emily Dickinson, poet
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Edgar Allan Poe, poems and short stories
Transcendentalist Writers
Ralph Waldo Emerson, essays and aphorisms
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Bronson Alcott
Margaret Fuller, first major feminist writer