Excerpt from A Century of American Literature, 1776-1876The aim of the present volume is to give a series of selections from some forty or fifty authors no longer living, illustrative of the growth of American literature from 1776 to 1876. It is designed to represent only polite literature in the narrow sense, poetry, fiction, humor, satire, sketches of life and character. History, biography, travel oratory, and, in general, what Cole ridge has called the literature of knowledge, are ex cluded.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.