or New England Renaissance
Period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil War in which U.S. literature came of age as an expression of a national spirit.
The literary scene was dominated by New England Brahmin writers, notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , Oliver Wendell Holmes , and James Russell Lowell . Also influential were the Transcendentalists (see Transcendentalism ), including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau , as well as the great imaginative writers Nathaniel Hawthorne , Herman Melville , Walt Whitman , and Edgar Allan Poe .