A Short History of Creative Writing in America

Abstract

The teaching of the crafts of fiction, nonfiction and poetry in degree-bearing institutions has its distant antecedent, at least in spirit, in the unofficial atel—ier or ‘school’, such as one might regard the Transcendentalists’ Brook Farm to be. But just as the combination of shoptalk, mutual editing and critical theory is exemplified by Wordsworth and Coleridge in England, surely the nexus of Hawthorne, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau and other New England writers of the 1840s exemplifies an American school ‘without walls’. Writers talked back to writers about vision and craft. Livelihoods came from second jobs as churchmen, teachers, editors or clerks in customs houses; seldom from publication. Interestingly, as portrayed by Perry Miller in The Raven and the Whale (1956), claims for a national literature emanated from such magazines in New York as the Knickerbocker Magazine, The Democratic Review and Poe’s The Broadway Journal.¹ Edgar Allan Poe, of course, first in Baltimore, then Philadelphia, then New York, was a central figure; and just as his famous review of Hawthorne, in laying out principles of craft, is often cited as the birth of the American Short Story, so too, it presents the American idiom of poet and critic.² Like a nineteenth century Aristotle, Poe offers his poetics.³ Here are works we value. Here are their characteristics. (For a different historical perspective, see D.G. Myers’s Elephants Teach: ‘The search for origins is a historical error.’)4

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