American Literature Comes of Age

In the decades before the Civil War, American writers forged a Romanticism inflected by New World themes of wilderness, sin, and individual conscience. Edgar Allan Poe, working chiefly in the short story and poem, helped invent the modern detective story and refined the Gothic tale of psychological horror in works such as 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and the narrative poem 'The Raven' (1845). Nathaniel Hawthorne turned to New England's Puritan past in The Scarlet Letter (1850), using the story of Hester Prynne's public punishment for adultery to explore sin, guilt, and hypocrisy through dense, allegorical symbolism.