The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (24 page)

(b. July 30, 1818, Thornton, Yorkshire, Eng.—d. Dec. 19, 1848, Haworth, Yorkshire

E
mily Brontë was an English novelist and poet who produced but one novel,
Wuthering Heights
(1847), a highly imaginative novel of passion and hate set on the Yorkshire moors.

Her father held a number of curacies: Hartshead-cum-Clifton, Yorkshire, was the birthplace of his elder daughters, Maria and Elizabeth (who died young), and nearby Thornton that of Emily and her siblings Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, and Anne. In 1820 the father became rector of Haworth, remaining there for the rest of his life.

After the death of their mother in 1821, the children were left very much to themselves in the bleak moorland rectory. The children were educated, during their early life, at home, except for a single year that Charlotte and Emily spent at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. In 1835, when Charlotte secured a teaching position at Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, Emily accompanied her as a pupil but suffered from homesickness and remained only three months. In 1838 Emily spent six exhausting months as a teacher in Miss Patchett's school at Law Hill, near Halifax, and then resigned.

To keep the family together at home, Charlotte planned to keep a school for girls at Haworth. In February 1842 she and Emily went to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management. Although Emily pined for home and for the wild moorlands, it seems that in Brussels she was better appreciated than Charlotte. Her passionate nature was more easily understood than Charlotte's decorous temperament. In October, however, when her aunt died, Emily returned permanently to Haworth.

In 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily, and this led to the discovery that all three sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—had written verse. A year later they published jointly a volume of verse,
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell
, the initials of these pseudonyms being those of the sisters. The book of verse contained 21 of Emily's poems, and a consensus of later criticism has accepted the fact that Emily's verse alone reveals true
poetic genius. The venture cost the sisters about £50 in all, and only two copies were sold.

By midsummer of 1847, Emily's
Wuthering Heights
and Anne's
Agnes Grey
had been accepted for joint publication by J. Cautley Newby of London, but publication of the three volumes was delayed until the appearance of their sister Charlotte's
Jane Eyre
, which was immediately and hugely successful.
Wuthering Heights
, when published in December 1847, did not fare well; critics were hostile, calling it too savage, too animal-like, and clumsy in construction. Only later did it come to be considered one of the finest novels in the English language. It is distinguished from other novels of the period by its dramatic and poetic presentation, its abstention from all comment by the author, and its unusual structure.

Soon after its publication, Emily's health began to fail rapidly. She had been ill for some time, but now her breathing became difficult, and she suffered great pain. She died of tuberculosis in December 1848. Emily was perhaps the greatest of the three Brontë sisters, but the record of her life is extremely meagre, for she was silent and reserved and left no correspondence of interest. Her single novel darkens rather than solves the mystery of her spiritual existence.

(b. May 31, 1819, West Hills, Long Island, N.Y., U.S.—d. March 26, 1892, Camden, N.J.)

W
alt Whitman was an American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse collection
Leaves of Grass
is a landmark in the history of American literature.

Whitman attended public school in Brooklyn, began working at the age of 12, and learned the printing trade.
He was employed as a printer in Brooklyn and New York City, taught in country schools on Long Island, and became a journalist. At the age of 23 he edited a daily newspaper in New York, and in 1846 he became editor of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, a fairly important newspaper of the time. Discharged from the
Eagle
early in 1848 because of his support for the Free Soil faction of the Democratic Party, he went to New Orleans, La., where he worked for three months on the
Crescent
before returning to New York via the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. After another abortive attempt at Free Soil journalism, he built houses and dabbled in real estate in New York from about 1850 until 1855.

Whitman had spent a great deal of his 36 years walking and observing in New York City and Long Island. He had visited the theatre frequently, and he had developed a strong love of music, especially opera. During these years he had also read extensively at home and in the New York libraries, and he began experimenting with a new style of poetry. While a schoolteacher, printer, and journalist he had published sentimental stories and poems in newspapers and popular magazines, but they showed almost no literary promise.

By the spring of 1855 Whitman had enough poems in his new style for a thin volume. Unable to find a publisher, he sold a house and printed the first edition of
Leaves of Grass
at his own expense. No publisher's or author's name appeared on the first edition in 1855, but the cover had a portrait of Whitman. Though little appreciated upon its appearance,
Leaves of Grass
was warmly praised by the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote to Whitman on receiving the poems that it was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom” America had yet contributed.

Whitman continued practicing his new style of writing in his private notebooks, and in 1856 the second edition of
Leaves of Grass
appeared. This collection contained revisions of the poems of the first edition and a new one, the
Sun-down Poem
(later to become
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
). The second edition was also a financial failure, and once again Whitman edited a daily newspaper, the
Brooklyn Times
, but was unemployed by the summer of 1859. In 1860 a Boston publisher brought out the third edition of
Leaves of Grass
, greatly enlarged and rearranged, but the outbreak of the American Civil War bankrupted the firm.

During the Civil War, Whitman took a temporary post in the paymaster's office in Washington. He spent his spare time visiting wounded and dying soldiers in the Washington hospitals. In January 1865 he became a clerk in the Department of the Interior; in May he was promoted but in June was dismissed because the secretary of the Interior thought that
Leaves of Grass
was indecent. Whitman then obtained a post in the attorney general's office, largely through the efforts of his friend, the journalist William O'Connor, who wrote a vindication of Whitman.

In May 1865 a collection of war poems entitled
Drum Taps
showed Whitman's readers a new kind of poetry, moving from the oratorical excitement with which he had greeted the falling-in and arming of the young men at the beginning of the Civil War to a disturbing awareness of what war really meant. The
Sequel to Drum Taps
, published in the autumn of 1865, contained his great elegy on President Abraham Lincoln,
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
.

The fourth edition of
Leaves of Grass
, published in 1867, contained much revision and rearrangement, and in the late 1860s Whitman's work began to receive greater recognition. In January 1873 his first stroke left him partly
paralyzed. Additional editions of
Leaves of Grass
followed, and the book finally reached the form in which it was henceforth to be published.
The Complete Poems and Prose
was published in 1888, along with the eighth edition of
Leaves of Grass
. The ninth, or “authorized,” edition appeared in 1892, the year of Whitman's death.

Under the influence of the Romantic movement in literature and art, Whitman held the theory that the chief function of the poet was to express his own personality in his verse. The first edition of
Leaves of Grass
also appeared during the most nationalistic period in American literature, when critics were calling for a literature commensurate with the size, natural resources, and potentialities of the North American continent. From this time on throughout his life Whitman attempted to dress the part and act the role of the shaggy, untamed poetic spokesman of the proud young nation. For the expression of this persona he also created a form of free verse without rhyme or metre, but abounding in oratorical rhythms and chanted lists of American place-names and objects.

(b. Aug. 1, 1819, New York City—d. Sept. 28, 1891, New York City)

T
he American novelist, short-story writer, and poet Herman Melville is best known for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece,
Moby Dick
(1851).

Born to a wealthy New York family that suffered great financial losses, Melville had little formal schooling and began a period of wanderings at sea in 1839, when he served as cabin boy on a merchant ship. The summer voyage did not dedicate Melville to the sea. After a grinding search for work, he eventually sailed on the whaler
Acushnet
, from New Bedford, Mass., on a voyage to the South Seas.

In June 1842 the
Acushnet
anchored in present-day French Polynesia. Melville's adventures here, somewhat romanticized, became the subject of his first novel,
Typee
(1846). In July Melville and a companion jumped ship and, according to
Typee
, spent about four months as guest-captives of the reputedly cannibalistic Typee people. Actually, in August he was registered in the crew of the Australian whaler
Lucy Ann
. Whatever its precise correspondence with fact, however,
Typee
was faithful to the imaginative impact of the experience on Melville.

Although Melville was down for a 120th share of the whaler's proceeds, the voyage had been unproductive. He joined a mutiny that landed the mutineers in a Tahitian jail, from which he escaped without difficulty. On these events and their sequel, Melville based his second book,
Omoo
(1847). Lighthearted in tone, with the mutiny shown as something of a farce, it describes Melville's travels through the islands. In November he signed as a harpooner on his last whaler, the
Charles & Henry
, out of Nantucket, Mass. Six months later he disembarked at Lahaina, in the Hawaiian Islands. In August 1843 he signed as an ordinary seaman on the frigate
United States
, which in October 1844 discharged him in Boston.

Typee
provoked immediate enthusiasm and outrage, and then a year later
Omoo
had an identical response. In 1847 Melville began a third book,
Mardi
(1849), and became a regular contributor of reviews and other pieces to a literary journal. When
Mardi
appeared, public and critics alike found its wild, allegorical fantasy and medley of styles incomprehensible. It began as another Polynesian adventure but quickly set its hero in pursuit of the mysterious Yillah, “all beauty and innocence,” a symbolic quest that ends in anguish and disaster. Concealing his disappointment at the book's reception, Melville quickly wrote
Redburn
(1849) and
White-Jacket
(1850). The critics
acclaimed
White-Jacket
, and its powerful criticism of abuses in the U.S. Navy won it strong political support. But both novels, however much they seemed to revive the Melville of
Typee
, had passages of profoundly questioning melancholy.