Explores the careers of important nineteenth-century religionists like Orestes Brownson, Isaac Hecker, Anna Hanson Dorsey, and Cardinal James Gibbons, tracing the distinctive literature that they created during the years that non-Catholic writers like Herman Melville were producing iconic works of American literature. This also reveals new dimensions in American religious literary culture by considering how the first important cohort of Catholic writers shaped their message for subsequent generations of readers.