Roget's Int'l Thesaurus Fowler's King's English The King James
Bible Brewer's Phrase & Fable Frazer's Golden Bough Shelf of
Fiction Carl Van Doren The American Novel Chapter 4. Nathaniel
Hawthorne Carl Van Doren The American Novel. far the cause of
the American novel had enlisted no man who came primarily for
the sake of art. Brown had been a radical journalist, Cooper a
stentorian man of action, Simms a passionate antiquarian,
Melville a transcendentalist with adventures to recount; but all
of them had been improvisatores, although Melville, it is true,
took some heed of his technical manuvers. The art of fiction was
being studied in the United States during this half century only
in connection with the short story, which Irving had invested
with his amused and amusing charm, of which Poe had discovered
secrets of structure and effect not heretofore analyzed, and
into which Hawthorne as the century advanced was pouring a
deeper and deeper strain of intellectual and moral significance.
Neither Irving nor Poe