Hannah Webster Foster

Total similar authors (36)

• 

  Herman Melville

  There is more than one author with this name
  
  Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
  Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a mer

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history.
  
  Shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College, Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. In 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales and became engaged to painter and illustrator Sophia Peabody the next year. He worked at a Custom House and joined a Transcendentalist Utopian community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was pub

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Harriet E. Wilson

  Traditionally considered the first female African-American novelist as well as the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig was published in 1859 and rediscovered in 1982.
  
  The daughter of Joshua Green, an African-American "hooper of barrels", and Margaret Ann (or Adams) Smith, a washerwoman of Irish ancestry. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother abandoned her at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr., a well-to-do Milford farmer. As an orphan, Adams was made an indentured servant to the Hayward family, a customary way for society to arrange support at the time. In exchange for her labor, the child would receive room, board and training in life skills, or that was

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Fanny Fern

  Fanny Fern, born Sara Willis (July 9, 1811 – October 10, 1872), was an American newspaper columnist, humorist, novelist, and author of children's stories in the 1850s-1870s. Fern's great popularity has been attributed to her conversational style and sense of what mattered to her mostly middle-class female readers. By 1855, Fern was the highest-paid columnist in the United States, commanding $100 per week for her New York Ledger column.
  
  A collection of her columns published in 1853 sold 70,000 copies in its first year. Her best-known work, the fictional autobiography Ruth Hall (1854), has become a popular subject among feminist literary scholars.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Henry James

  Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
  He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Herman Melville

  There is more than one author with this name
  
  Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
  Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a mer

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Bernhard Schlink

  Bernhard Schlink is a German lawyer, academic, and novelist. He is best known for his novel The Reader, which was first published in 1995 and became an international bestseller. He won the 2014 Park Kyong-ni Prize.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history.
  
  Shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College, Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. In 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales and became engaged to painter and illustrator Sophia Peabody the next year. He worked at a Custom House and joined a Transcendentalist Utopian community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was pub

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion, something Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension," Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he believed in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of Freethought edited by Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely death of his first wife, Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a year-long trip to Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such intelligentsia as British writer Thomas Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He returned to the United States in 1833, to a life

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Maxine Hong Kingston

  Best known works, including The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980), of American writer Maxine Hong Kingston combine elements of fiction and memoir.
  
  She was born as Maxine Ting Ting Hong to a laundry house owner in Stockton, California. She was the third of eight children, and the first among them born in the United States. Her mother trained as a midwife at the To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. Tom left China for America in 1924 and took a job in a laundry.
  
  Her works often reflect on her cultural heritage and blend fiction with non-fiction. Among her works are The Woman Warrior (1976), awarded the National Book Critics Circle Awar

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Samuel Richardson

  Pamela (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1748) of English writer Samuel Richardson helped to legitimize the novel as a literary form in English.
  
  An established printer and publisher for most of his life, Richardson wrote his first novel at the age of 51. He is best known for his major 18th-century epistolary novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753).
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_...
  

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Frederick Douglass

  Frederick Douglass (né Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey) was born a slave in the state of Maryland in 1818. After his escape from slavery, Douglass became a renowned abolitionist, editor and feminist. Having escaped from slavery at age 20, he took the name Frederick Douglass for himself and became an advocate of abolition. Douglass traveled widely, and often perilously, to lecture against slavery.
  
  His first of three autobiographies, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, was published in 1845. In 1847 he moved to Rochester, New York, and started working with fellow abolitionist Martin R. Delany to publish a weekly anti-slavery newspaper, North Star. Douglass was the only man to speak in favor of Elizabeth C

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Stephen Crane

  Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist, best known for the novel, The Red Badge of Courage. That work introduced the reading world to Crane's striking prose, a mix of impressionism, naturalism and symbolism. He died at age 28 in Badenweiler, Baden, Germany.
  
  Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Great political influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin , novel against slavery of 1852 of Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, American writer, advanced the cause of abolition.
  
  Lyman Beecher fathered Catharine Esther Beecher, Edward Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, another child.
  
  Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, an author, attacked the cruelty, and reached millions of persons as a play even in Britain. She made the tangible issues of the 1850s to millions and energized forces in the north. She angered and embittered the south. A commonly quoted statement, apocryphally attributed to Abraham Lincoln, sums up the effect. He met Stowe and then said, "So you're the little woman that started this great war!" or so people say.
  
  AKA:
  Χ

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Washington Irving

  People remember American writer Washington Irving for the stories " Rip Van Winkle " and " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ," contained in The Sketch Book (1820).
  
  This author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century wrote newspaper articles under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle to begin his literary career at the age of nineteen years.
  
  In 1809, he published The History of New York under his most popular public persona, Diedrich Knickerbocker.
  
  Historical works of Irving include a five volume biography of George Washington (after whom he was named) as well as biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad, and several histories, dealing with subjects, such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra, of 15th-ce

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Molière

  Sophisticated comedies of French playwright Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, include Tartuffe (1664), The Misanthrope (1666), and The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670).
  
  French literary figures, including Molière and Jean de la Fontaine, gathered at Auteuil, a favorite place.
  
  People know and consider Molière, stage of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, also an actor of the greatest masters in western literature. People best know l'Ecole des femmes (The School for Wives), l'Avare ou l'École du mensonge (The Miser), and le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) among dramas of Molière.
  
  From a prosperous family, Molière studied at the Jesuit Clermont college (now lycée Louis-le-Grand) and well suited to begin a life in the

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Charles Brockden Brown

  Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decad

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Charles W. Chesnutt

  Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an author, essayist and political activist, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Susanna Rowson

  Susanna Rowson, née Haswell, was a British-American novelist, poet, playwright, religious writer, stage actress, and educator. She was the author of the novel Charlotte Temple--the most popular bestseller in American literature until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

  Born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland. After her mother died when she was three years old in 1828, Watkins was orphaned. She was raised by her aunt and uncle. She was educated at the Academy for Negro Youth, a school run by her uncle Rev. William Watkins, who was a civil rights activist. He was a major influence on her life and work. At fourteen, she found work as a seamstress.
  
  Frances Watkins had her first volume of verse, Forest Leaves, published in 1845 (it has been lost). Her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, published in 1854, was extremely popular. Over the next few years, it was reprinted in 20 editions. Many African American women's service clubs named themselves in her honor, and across the nation, in cities such a

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Kirsten Miller

  Kirsten Miller grew up in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina. At seventeen, she left for college in New York City, where she lives to this day. Kirsten's latest novel, Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books, is a side-splitting satire that takes on some of the most controversial issues of our day. Her first adult novel, The Change, was a Good Morning America Book Club pick for May 2022. Kirsten is also the author of over a dozen middle grade and YA novels, including the acclaimed Kiki Strike books, (which tell the tale of the delinquent girl geniuses who keep Manhattan safe), and How to Lead a Life of Crime. She is not the Kirsten Miller who wrote All That Is Left, but she assumes that Kirsten is lovely and talented. Librar

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Harriet E. Wilson

  Traditionally considered the first female African-American novelist as well as the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig was published in 1859 and rediscovered in 1982.
  
  The daughter of Joshua Green, an African-American "hooper of barrels", and Margaret Ann (or Adams) Smith, a washerwoman of Irish ancestry. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother abandoned her at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr., a well-to-do Milford farmer. As an orphan, Adams was made an indentured servant to the Hayward family, a customary way for society to arrange support at the time. In exchange for her labor, the child would receive room, board and training in life skills, or that was

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Royall Tyler

  Royall Tyler (1757-1826) was an American jurist and playwright who wrote The Contrast in 1787 and published The Algerine Captive in 1797. He also wrote several legal tracts, six plays, a musical drama, two long poems, a semifictional travel narrative, The Yankey in London (1809), and essays. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, he attended the Boston Latin School and then Harvard, where he earned a reputation as a quick-witted joker. After graduation, he joined the Continental Army. In late 1778, he returned to Harvard to study law, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1780. He opened a practice in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1801, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Vermont as an assistant judge, and was later elected chief

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Fanny Fern

  Fanny Fern, born Sara Willis (July 9, 1811 – October 10, 1872), was an American newspaper columnist, humorist, novelist, and author of children's stories in the 1850s-1870s. Fern's great popularity has been attributed to her conversational style and sense of what mattered to her mostly middle-class female readers. By 1855, Fern was the highest-paid columnist in the United States, commanding $100 per week for her New York Ledger column.
  
  A collection of her columns published in 1853 sold 70,000 copies in its first year. Her best-known work, the fictional autobiography Ruth Hall (1854), has become a popular subject among feminist literary scholars.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Olaudah Equiano

  Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British movement of the abolition for the slave trade. Although enslaved as a young man, he purchased his freedom and worked as an author, merchant, and explorer in South America, the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, and the United Kingdom.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Mary Rowlandson

  1635 -1711
  Mrs. Mary White Rowlandson was a Puritan resident of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who was captured by Native Americans and held for 11 weeks before being ransomed in 1676. Her later memoir of these events became the first American best-seller, going through four editions in one year.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Catharine Maria Sedgwick

  Catharine Maria Sedgwick was born December 28, 1789 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. As a young woman, Sedgwick took charge of a school in Lenox. She converted from Calvinism to Unitarianism, which led her to write a pamphlet denouncing religious intolerance. This further inspired her to write her first novel, A New-England Tale.
  
  With her work much in demand, from the 1820s to the 1850s, Sedgwick made a good living writing short stories for a variety of periodicals. She died in 1867, and by the end of the 19th century, she had been relegated to near obscurity. There was a rise of male critics who deprecated women's writing as they worked to create an American literature.
  
  Interest in Sedgwick's works and an appreciation of her contribution to

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Julia Ward Howe

  American writer and feminist Julia Ward Howe, active in the suffrage movement of women, wrote " Battle Hymn of the Republic " (1862) and edited Woman's Journal from 1870 to 1890.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_W...
  

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Harriet Ann Jacobs, usually wrote under the name Harriet Jacobs but also used the pseudonym Linda Brent.
  
  Harriet was born in Edenton, North Carolina to Daniel Jacobs and Delilah. Her father was a mulatto carpenter and slave owned by Dr. Andrew Knox. Her mother was a mulatto slave owned by John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Harriet inherited the status of both her parents as a slave by birth. She was raised by Delilah until the latter died around 1819. She then was raised by her mother's mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who taught her how to sew, read, and write.
  
  In 1823, Margaret Horniblow died, and Harriet was willed to Horniblow's niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, whose father, Dr. James Norcom, became her new master. She and her brother John went to

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Julia Ward Howe

  American writer and feminist Julia Ward Howe, active in the suffrage movement of women, wrote " Battle Hymn of the Republic " (1862) and edited Woman's Journal from 1870 to 1890.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_W...
  

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Susanna Rowson

  Susanna Rowson, née Haswell, was a British-American novelist, poet, playwright, religious writer, stage actress, and educator. She was the author of the novel Charlotte Temple--the most popular bestseller in American literature until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Charles Brockden Brown

  Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decad

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Royall Tyler

  Royall Tyler (1757-1826) was an American jurist and playwright who wrote The Contrast in 1787 and published The Algerine Captive in 1797. He also wrote several legal tracts, six plays, a musical drama, two long poems, a semifictional travel narrative, The Yankey in London (1809), and essays. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, he attended the Boston Latin School and then Harvard, where he earned a reputation as a quick-witted joker. After graduation, he joined the Continental Army. In late 1778, he returned to Harvard to study law, and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1780. He opened a practice in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1801, he was appointed to the Supreme Court of Vermont as an assistant judge, and was later elected chief

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Robert Montgomery Bird

  Robert Montgomery Bird was an American novelist, playwright, and physician.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  Robert S. Levine

  Robert S. Levine (Ph.D. Stanford University 1981) is Distinguished University Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park.
  Levine is the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and is a member of the editorial boards of American Literary History, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

  Buy books on Amazon
• 

  John William De Forest

  John William De Forest was an American soldier and writer, best known for his Civil War novel "Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty."

  Buy books on Amazon