1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910367645903321

Autore

Bryant William Cullen <1794-1878.>

Titolo

The Letters of William Cullen Bryant : Volume III, 1849–1857 / / edited by William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss . Vol. III 1849-1857 1849-1857 . Vol. III

Pubbl/distr/stampa

LaVergne, : Fordham University Press, 2019

New York : , : Fordham University Press, 1981

©1981

ISBN

0-8232-8727-0

0-585-24757-9

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (564 p.) : 9

Classificazione

BIO000000LIT014000

Altri autori (Persone)

BryantWilliam Cullen <1908-1999.>

Disciplina

811/.3

Soggetti

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General

Brieven (vorm)

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Key to Manuscript Sources Often Cited in Footnotes -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Bryant Chronology 1849-1857 -- Bryant's Correspondents 1849-1857 -- XIV. Cuba, Scotland, and Europe under the Bayonet 1849 -- XV. Retrospections and Projections 1850-1852 -- XVI. Voyage to the East 1852-1853 -- XVII. Tumults of the Noisy World 1853-1857 -- XVIII. A Sea Change and Spain 1857 -- Abbreviations and Short Titles -- Index of Recipients. Volume III -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

During the years covered in this volume, Bryant traveled more often and widely than at any comparable period during his life. The visits to Great Britain and Europe, a tour of the Near East and the Holy Land, and excursions in Cuba, Spain, and North Africa, as well as two trips to Illinois, he described in frequent letters to the Evening Post. Reprinted widely, and later published in two volumes, these met much critical acclaim, one notice praising the "quiet charm of these letters, written mostly from out-of-the-way places, giving charming pictures of nature and people, with the most delicate choice of words, and yet in the perfect simplicity of the true epistolary style."His absence during nearly



one-fifth of this nine-year period reflected the growing prosperity of Bryant's newspaper, and his confidence in his editorial partner John Bigelow and correspondents such as William S. Thayer, as well as in the financial acumen of his business partner Isaac Henderson. These were crucial years in domestic politics, however, and Bryant's guidance of Evening Post policies was evident in editorials treating major issues such as the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the rise of the Republican Party, and the Dred Scott Decision, as well as in his correspondence with such statesmen as Salmon P. Chase, Hamilton Fish, William L. Marcy, Edwin D. Morgan, and Charles Sumner. His travel letters and journalistic writings reflected as well his acute interest in a Europe in turmoil. In France and Germany he saw the struggles between revolution and repression; in Spain he talked with journalists, parliamentary leaders, and the future president of the first Spanish republic; in New York he greeted Louis Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi.Bryant's close association with the arts continued. He sat for portraits to a dozen painters, among them Henry P. Gray, Daniel Huntington, Asher Durand, Charles L. Elliott, and Samuel Laurence. The landscapists continued to be inspired by his poetic themes. Sculptor Horatio Greenough asked of Bryant a critical reading of his pioneering essays on functionalism. His old friend, the tragedian Edwin Forrest, sought his mediation in what would become the most sensational divorce case of the century, with Bryant and his family as witnesses. His long advocacy of a great central park in New York was consummated by the legislature. And in 1852, his eulogy on the life of James Fenimore Cooper became the first of several such orations which would establish him as the memorialist of his literary contemporaries in New York.