Writers like Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper achieved international reputations as distinctively American writers. Still, most Americans, and certainly most American writers, regarded their literature as not necessarily distinct from but rather in conversation with English literary traditions. American writers in this period did not write uncritically patriotic texts. Instead, their works reflected and participated in anxieties about the future of a young nation grappling with divisive issues such as slavery, states’ rights, national tariffs, and other matters. Many writers and artists in the 1820s placed a special emphasis on the importance of America’s natural landscape for the development of national
