Authors of American Gothic Literature

Please use the following information to complete the "Authors of Gothicism" section of your handout:

Authors of Gothicism:

The grotesque, the gloomy, the morbid, the fantastic-the American Dark Romantics embraced all of these illogical elements and shaped them into perhaps the most popular sub-genre of American literature. Unlike the Transcendentalists, the Gothics acknowledged the evil of man and the horror of evil. Ralph Waldo Emerson had ignored the darkness of man, sin and control, but the Gothics wanted to remind the world of the existence of evil. Like the Romantics and Transcendentalists; however, the Dark Romantics valued intuition and emotion over logic and reason and saw symbols, spiritual truths, and signs in nature and everyday events.

The key figures of Dark Romanticism included Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the psychological thriller and an American pop-culture icon, wrote such popular works as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Cask of Amontillado." His mystery stories, "The Purloined Letter" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" paved the way for the modern detective story.

Although Herman Melville was not as popular as Poe, he contributed to Gothicism and the development of the Romantic hero with Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847). Similar works brought him fame and prosperity. However, the publication of Moby Dick in 1851 left many of his readers confused. The tale of the white whale is Melville's greatest work, in which audiences at the time failed to grasp it's complexity and symbolism. Now considered a modern classic, Moby Dick is enjoyed as one of the greatest American novels written. Moby Dick is a tale of good vs. evil, and man vs. nature. As evil prevails in the story, the novel is considered a Dark Romantic work. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote such popular fiction as The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851). The Scarlet Letter is an example of Gothic Romanticism. Its gloomy tone, color imagery, supernatural allusions, use of symbols in nature and in civilization, and nonconformist themes certainly made The Scarlet Letter an important contribution to Dark Romanticism. Two of Hawthorne's short stories-"Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil"-are both consistent with the Dark Romantic tradition. In both tales, Hawthorne digs deep into the human mind and examines sin and evil.