Is Hawthorne the first canonical American author? I want to start

>emerson's essays and poems
>hawthorne's short stories and novels
>Melville's Moby Dick and Piazza Tales
>Poe's longer works
There's your starting point senpai

Also Washington Irving.

>>8163905
No

>>8163905
Yeah, I'm with >>8163943: I tried reading his Alhambra stories and they were boring.

>>8164033
And now you know gringos can't write for shit

>>8164046
Peasant tier post tbqh

File: Charles_Brockden_Brown.jpg (81KB, 342x418px) Image search: [Google]

81KB, 342x418px

>>8163688
>>8163855
>>8163905
>19th century starting point

Wieland published 1798, and actually pretty fucking neato

Where should I start with Faulkner?

>>8164270
In another thread for one thing.

Read 'Earth's Holocaust' OP, great story. For the most part, however, I'm not interested in Hawthorne. His prose is fantastic but his subject matter doesn't appeal to me

>>8164270
As I Lay Dying

>tfw just got a Norton Critical edition of Hawthorne's tales AND an older edition bu a different publisher that includes other sketches and tales Norton didn't

>>8164480
I got the LoA edition of his Tales and Sketches over the weekend and it's a big-ass thing of a tome, even by LoA standards.
I guess I was used to thinking of Hawthorne as having written a few short novels and a book of Gothic fairy tales. It's like how people often overlook Arthur Gordon Pym.

Hawthorne is America's first great author (the second greatest, IMHO, only behind Melville). However, if you want a starting point, you could easily go back to Washington Irving, the first prose writer of substance the US produced. If you want to REALLY go back, you can start with the Puritans (Mather, Bradstreet, Winthrop) but they disn't write prose fiction

Read >>8164264

This guy is absolutely right. Serious influence on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and really interesting if you read it along with Todarov's Essay on The Fantastic.