Writers by Region - Eastern American Writers

Eastern American writers include: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Langston Hughes, Henry James, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, T.S. Eliot and possibly reclusive Thomas Pynchon. More recent writers from eastern America include: Jonathan Safron Froer, John Ashbery, Jonathan Lethem, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Don DeLillo.

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Many great and historic writers hail from the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America. Men and women since the revolution have set down famous lines in pen and ink. Poets in the 19^th and then novelists in the 20^th century hail from the east coast. The business of American writing is said to center in New York City, with the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, and The New Yorker headlining the long list of publications that call NY City home.

America's first literary movement and perhaps its most cohesive, cogent, and influential came from New England - the Transcendentalists.

Eastern American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were the leaders and most successful writers of this movement. Emerson was, perhaps, the great poet of his day, a poet of the people and of the moment. He was a poet in the same way that Bob Dylan was a poet, capturing the imagination of a large audience and speaking directly to the soul of his people.

Emerson's poetry does not stand up to the test of time as well as we might all wish it did. Like his cohort, Thoreau, Emerson allowed himself to be swept up in his polemic and in his ideas to such an extent that the poetry suffered. To call Emerson a thinker first and a poet second seems fair, but one must respect the spiritual-intellectual sway of his writing. He managed to create and articulate a very complex set of existential principles and make them so practical as to become political.

Emerson's feat then, was not a small one.

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Another eastern American writer, Walt Whitman became an international literary figure after his poetry gained notoriety in France. The first eastern American writer to gain literary fame abroad, Whitman's career in France actually outpaced his career in America for a time.

He dedicated himself to poetry at the same age, 37, Vincent Van Gogh committed suicide. Like Van Gogh, Whitman created a style of writing that was extremely personal, honest, and evocative of the truth of human experience.

Like Van Gogh, Whitman was under-appreciated in his lifetime.

Unlike Van Gogh, however, Whitman was able to make his passion into a marginally successful career. He was, in the end, a professional writer, where Van Gogh was a working painter who tragically could not find an audience to purchase his work.

The poetry of Walt Whitman insists on exploring the human spirit, happy to leave the mind behind if necessary. This is not to say that the poetry lacks intellectual brilliance, but is meant to say instead that Whitman's goal was to unveil a grand emotional truth. He bent all his intellect toward this task. He concentrated all his genius on it.

And he succeeded.

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New York City is almost a literary country of its own. Many, many writers have come out of or gone into this great eastern American city - to take up the torch of literature. Or, perhaps, the torch was already in their hands but they needed to live in a place where people could see it burn. This unique metropolis on the east coast is home to so many writers, the task of naming them is daunting.

In the 20^th century, New York City was taken over by a madman named Norman Mailer. He is a novelist who, at one time, everyone read.

We can hope that he rises again to popularity because his work is original enough to be inspiring and he serves as an interesting candidate for "Hemingway II", with his extreme bravado (both literary and otherwise) and his willingness to explore. No two Mailer novels are alike. From The Naked and the Dead to An American Dream, his work and his ideas continued to change, sometimes drastically. Some of his novels deal with east coast life (NYC) and others are set abroad or in California, but because Norman Mailer put his stamp on New York City by running for mayor there(!), he is quintessentially an eastern American writer.

Another 20^th century novelist from New York City is James Baldwin. Author of around twenty books, including essays, a play, and his novels, Baldwin mapped an emotional territory that should not be under-appreciated.

James Baldwin wrote about the experiences of black Americans, gay Americans; life in the theater, life as a writer, life as an American abroad, family relationships, the life of the soul, religion in the American family, and he wrote about sex.

Baldwin was as thoroughly American as they come and he put all of it on the page. He was so prolific one wonders where he got the time to do and imagine all the things we wrote about.

Last to be discussed but in no way least is Henry Miller. A novelist of the top tier, Miller found a way to marry prose and poetry with a method that is captivating and that is engaged with story-telling without being terribly interested in narrative.

Henry Miller is America's preeminent writer on sex and the experience of sex in fiction. But he writes something that is not really fiction. It's the mind of a person in love with life, harassed by it, incensed by it, angry and alive in it, like a kid standing next to a huge vat marked "Life" standing on his tip-toes trying to see over the top...When he can't quite do it, he spills the whole thing on the ground and shouts with the most articulate joy...