Our literature really began with the New-Yorkers, Irving, Cooper, and Bryant. Then came the New England group, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, and the historians, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman, to which list the name of Harriet Beecher Stowe should be added. In the South we had Edgar Allan Poe, Simms, Lanier, and later Cable and Page. The Western country has given us Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Riley. Realism has its representatives in fiction in Howells, James, and Mary Wilkins Freeman, and in poetry in Walt Whitman.
To-day we have nature writers, including John Burroughs and Stewart Edward White. We have such essayists as William Winter, Henry Van Dyke, Agnes Repplier, and Samuel Crothers. We have the poets John Vance Cheney, James Whitcomb Riley, Madison Cawein, Anna Branch and Josephine Preston Peabody. We have the historical writers McMaster, James Schouler, James Ford Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge. And among the novelists may be mentioned Winston Churchill, Margaret Deland, Robert Grant, S. Weir Mitchell, Edith Wharton, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Ellen Glasgow, F. Hopkinson Smith, Hamlin Garland, Robert Herrick, Jack London, and Booth Tarkington.
In early days our painters were Gilbert Stuart, Copley, and Benjamin West; in later years, Inness, Whistler, La Farge, Abbey, and Sargent. Our sculptors have been Powers, Crawford, Saint-Gaudens, French, Borglum, MacMonnies, and Potter.
In music we have had MacDowell, Chadwick, Nevin, and Parker; in architecture, Upjohn, Richardson, Stanford White, the Hunts, and Carrère.
For a general survey of our country, read Bryce's American Commonwealth.
CHAPTER IV
The Home
I—THE DWELLING-HOUSE
1. The House Desirable—Where to live; city or country; the most economical kind of house; necessities and luxuries.