2008 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Proclaimed by James Fenimore Cooper to be "the author of America," William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was one of nineteenth-century America's foremost poets and public intellectuals. In this, the first major biography of Bryant in almost forty years, Gilbert H. Muller reintroduces a quintessential New Yorker who commanded the nation's literary, cultural, urban, and political life for more than half a century.

A transplanted Yankee, Bryant arrived on the unpaved streets of Manhattan in the early 1820s and he would soon find himself at the locus of the many political and cultural transformations sweeping Manhattan and the nation. The bedrock of Bryant's cultural authority was his reputation as "America's first poet," and he enthralled a nation and his peers—including Whitman, Poe, Longfellow, and Emerson—who praised the excellence of his verse. A literary celebrity for almost seventy years, Bryant served as the editor of theNew-York Evening Post for five decades, and was a major force behind the establishment of Central Park, the National Academy of Design, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Drawing on previously unavailable letters and nineteenth-century files of theNew-York Evening Post, Muller creates a humanistic portrait of New York City's "first citizen," establishes him as a first-rate poet, and makes a convincing case for Bryant's role in defining the idea of democratic culture in America.

Preface

1. America’s First Poet

2. Pedlar of Law and Poetry

3. The Delectable City of Gotham

4. Apprentice Editor

5. Jackson Democrat

6. Yankee Brawls

7. My Native Country

8. Leggett’s Legacy

9. Politics and Poetry

10. Among the First in the World

11. Kindred Spirits

12. Old Temples and Tombs

13. Tumults of the Noisy World

14. Lincoln

15. Days of Slaughter

16. Like One Shut Out of Paradise

17. A Century’s Space

Source Notes
Bibliography
Index