Republic of Letters

While much has been written about intellectual elites in American history from New England Puritans in the seventeenth century to New York Jews in the twentieth, little scholarly attention has been paid to the ongoing history of what Henry Adams called "the literary class of the United States," considered as a distinct community within the national democratic society. Leading spokesmen for this American literary culture, such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Daniel Webster, and Edgar Allen Poe, were not average Americans at all. As eminent intellectuals they were uncommon men, and to present them as representing the American Mind served falsely to intellectualize the national democratic mentality, while falsely democratizing the intellectual elite of which they were leading members. This class of reading men and women has always constituted no more than a small fraction of the American public, yet their influence on the nation's intellectual development-both public and private-continues to be profound. Republic of Letters is a sweeping account of this literary class in the United States, the serious readers and especially writers from Independence to the Civil War.