American
Renaissance is the name sometimes given to a flourishing of distinctively
American literature in the period before the Civil War. As described by F. O.
Matthiessen in his influential critical work American Renaissance (1941), this
renaissance is represented by the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, H. D. Thoreau,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Its major works are
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and Whitman's
Leaves of Grass (1855). The American Renaissance may be regarded as a delayed
manifestation of Romanticism, especially in Emerson's philosophy of Transcendentalism.