Deschutes Public Library

Browse a selection of literary figures who wrote during and about the American Civil War. For more information about these figures and thousands more, visit the library's online resource, Biography in Context.

---

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)is generally considered to be the most important American poet of the 19th century. He wrote in free verse, relying heavily on the rhythms of native American speech. In all, over a 37-year period, Walt Whitman published nine separate editions of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. The final, 1892 edition, is the one familiar to readers today. He has strongly influenced the direction of 20th-century American poets, especially Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and, most recently, Allen Ginsberg and other "beat" poets.

Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Huntington town, Long Island, the second of nine children. His family soon moved to Brooklyn, where he attended school for a few years. By 1830 his formal education was over, and for the next five years he learned the printing trade. For about five years, beginning in 1836, he taught school, on Long Island; during this time he also founded the weekly newspaper Long-Islander. (More)


Related Work: "The Wound Dresser"

• Web Page - www.bartleby.com/42/818.html

More by Walt Whitman in the library catalog.

---

Ambrose Bierce

The American writer Ambrose Gwinett Bierce (1842-ca. 1914) expressed the cynicism of the post-Civil War era and shaped both the materials and the methods of writers who later voiced the disillusionment following World War I.

Ambrose Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio, and reared in Kosciusko County, Ind. He was a printer's apprentice before enlisting and serving with distinction in the Civil War. He launched a journalistic career in California and continued it in London from 1872 to 1876. There he served on the staffs of the magazines Fun and the Lantern, contributed to Hood's Comic Almanac, and under the pseudonym Dod Grile published the books Fiend's Delight (1872), Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (1872), and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874). Back in California he became an outstanding contributor to William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. In 1897 he went to Washington, D.C., as a correspondent for the Hearst papers. (More)


Related Work: "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

• Library Book
• Library eBook (right click and choose save to download)

More by Ambrose Bierce in the library catalog.

---

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The insistent moral tone, sentimentality, and serene idealism of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) made him an extremely popular author at home and abroad in the 19th century.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on Feb. 27, 1807, of an established New England family. He attended Portland Academy and then Bowdoin College, graduating in 1825. He was an excellent student whose skill in languages led the trustees at Bowdoin (of which his father was one) to offer the young graduate a professorship of modern languages. He prepared himself further with study abroad (at his own expense) before undertaking his duties. (More)


Related Work: "The Slave's Dream"

• Web Page - www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=77

More by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the library catalog.

---

Emily Dickinson

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?" A rhetorical question, for Emily Dickinson, the lyric poet sometimes known as the New England mystic, knew there was no other way. She spent her life creating an opus of 1,775 poems, only ten of which were published in her lifetime. She knew what made poetry, otherwise she could never have kept writing in the face of such public indifference. Yet this question was still posed in an 1870 letter to the literary editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a man with whom Dickinson corresponded for many years about her poetry. Higginson, who professed to know exactly what made a good poem, managed to pass over 102 of Dickinson's which she sent to him over the course of their correspondence. He advised the Amherst poet to study her craft further, but never offered to publish one of the poems she sent to him. (More)


Related Work: "Victory Comes Late"

• Web Page - www.bartleby.com/113/1052.html
• Library eBook (right click and choose save to download)

More by Emily Dickinson in the library catalog.

---

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The impact created in 1852 by the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin of Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) made her the most widely known American woman writer of the 19th century.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's personality and her work are mint products of her culture. They represent a special combination of rigid Calvinist discipline (fight against it though she tried), sentimental weakness for the romanticism of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and a crusading sense of social and political responsibility.

"Hattie" Beecher was born in Litchfield, Conn., on June 14, 1811, into a family of powerful and very demanding individuals. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a fiery, evangelical Calvinist who drove his six sons and two daughters along the straight and narrow path of devotion to God, to duty, and to himself. Her mother, Roxana Foote Beecher, died when she was 4, leaving a legacy of quiet gentleness and a brother--the Beecher children's uncle Samuel Foote. Uncle Sam, retired sea captain, brought a sense of romance and adventure into the household, as well as a measure of warm tolerance which might otherwise have been absent. (More)


Related Work: Uncle Tom's Cabin

• Library Book
• Library eBook (right click and choose save to download)

More by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the library catalog.

---

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871-1900), an American fiction writer and poet, was also a newspaper reporter. His novel "The Red Badge of Courage" stands high among the world's books depicting warfare. After the Civil War, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and others established realism as the standard mode of American fiction. In the 1890s younger writers tried to enlarge the territory of realism with impressionist, symbolist, and even new romantic approaches. Of these pioneers, Stephen Crane was the most influential.

Crane was born on Nov. 1, 1871, the fourteenth and last child of Mary Helen Crane and the Reverend Doctor Jonathan Townley Crane, presiding elder of the Newark, N.J., district of the Methodist Church. A frail child, Stephen moved with his family from one parsonage to another during his first 8 years. In 1880, with the death of his father, his mother moved her family to Asbury Park, N.J. Stephen was exposed early to writing as a career: his mother wrote on religious topics and lectured for the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and his brother Townley worked as a newspaper reporter. (More)


Related Work: Red Badge of Courage

• Library Book
• Library eBook (right click and choose save to download)

More by Stephen Crane in the library catalog.

---

Louisa May Alcott

Nineteenth-century American writer Louisa May Alcott was the author of the acclaimed and beloved children's classic Little Women; or Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and of numerous other popular works for children. Though she produced adult novels and stories as well, Alcott is most celebrated for her children's fiction, which includes the eight novels grouped under the "Little Women" series. Autobiographical in nature, Alcott's "Little Women" books were modeled after her parents and sisters as well as friends and neighbors in her native New England, and she is credited with being a pioneer in the creation of realistic fiction for children. Her novels are noted for their perceptive and highly entertaining accounts of childhood, for her portrayal of children as multi-dimensional, thinking individuals, and for her lively and warm depictions of family life. Alcott enjoyed widespread popularity in her lifetime as a children's author, while today books like Little Women and Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys--which have been translated into numerous foreign languages--are still read and appreciated by children around the world. (More)


Related Work: "Hospital Sketches"

• Library Book
• Library eBook (right click and choose save to download)

More by Louisa May Alcott in the library catalog.

---

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) made his chosen pseudonym, Mark Twain, one of the most famous names not only in American literature, but in literature worldwide. Born in Florida, Missouri, he was raised in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri, became a printer's apprentice, and then, in 1847, joined his brother Orion's Hannibal Journal. From 1853 to 1857, Twain traveled and worked as a newspaper correspondent and a printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. However, his consuming ambition, since boyhood, had been to become a Mississippi steamboat pilot. Moving to New Orleans in 1857, he apprenticed to a veteran pilot and worked in the trade until the Civil War blockades brought an end to river commerce. After an abortive stint as a Confederate soldier, Twain traveled in 1861 by stagecoach to Carson City, Nevada, with his brother Orion, who had secured a federal appointment as territorial secretary. Twain made desultory and wholly unsuccessful attempts at silver and gold mining before resuming his journalistic career as a correspondent for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. It was for this newspaper that he began writing humorous sketches of Western life, at first under the pseudonym "Josh," but then, in 1863, under "Mark Twain," a name he borrowed from the call of a Mississippi steamboat leadsman signifying a depth of two fathoms, safe water for a steamboat. (More)



Works by Mark Twain in the library catalog.