The American Literary Blog

I find that people are imagining I have been very industrious this winter, by the way they talk about my new book, which they suppose is so...

Rebecca Harding Davis submitted her manuscript for "David Gaunt" to James T. Fields , editor and publisher of The Atlantic Mont...

"I am over head and ears on my Journey to Central Africa ," Bayard Taylor wrote to his publisher James T. Fields on June 12, 1...

May 6, 1862: Henry David Thoreau died 150 years ago today. Throughout the winter of 1861-62 Thoreau was confined to the house as his hea...

The Leghorn steamer slid smoothly over the glassy Tyrrhene strait, and sometime during the night came to anchor in the harbor of Bastia. I s...

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne outlived her husband Nathaniel Hawthorne by seven years. When Hawthorne died far from home in 1864, she wrote t...

Originally named Mount Pleasant, this small village in southwestern Ohio was renamed Mount Healthy in 1850, following an outbreak of cholera...

August 5, 1850 may have been the most exciting day in American literary history. A band of now-recognized literary giants (and a couple l...

In the mid-19th century, an up-and-coming writer could get no better endorsement than one from John Greenleaf Whittier . On behalf of a youn...

Convicted murderer Louis Wagner was executed on June 25, 1875. In March of that year on the Isles of Shoals (Smuttynose, specifically), two...

James T. Fields changed the business of American publishing. More than serving as a publisher or literary agent, however, Fields was a clos...

Nathaniel Hawthorne was already an established literary figure when he traveled to Washington, D.C. with his publisher William Ticknor in...

Edwin Percy Whipple (that's E. P. Whipple to his readers) was born March 8, 1819. He got his feet wet as a critic for the Philadelphi...

The sun that brief December day Rose cheerless over hills of gray, And, darkly circled, gave at noon A sadder light than waning moon. Th...

The travel writer, critic, and editor Bayard Taylor wrote to James T. Fields on January 22, 1869. Writing from his home in Kennett Squar...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote to Annie Adams Fields , wife of his publisher James T. Fields , on January 18, 1864. Mrs. Fields had writt...

James Thomas Fields was born on December 31, 1817. That year, Sir Walter Scott published Rob Roy , Jane Austen published Northanger Abbey ,...