Download or read book Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 written by Elizabeth Hewitt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-25 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Hewitt argues that many canonical American authors, including Jefferson, Emerson, Melville, Dickinson and Whitman, turned to letter-writing as an idealized genre through which to consider the challenges of American democracy before the Civil War. Hewitt maintains that, although correspondence is generally only conceived as a biographical archive, it must instead be understood as a significant genre through which these early authors made sense of social and political relations in the new nation.