ABSTRACT
John William De Forest was born in Seymour, Connecticut and wrote comparatively undistinguished novels, as well as a work of history and travel books, between 1851 and 1859. After raising a company of volunteers for the Union at the start of the Civil War, he was commissioned a captain in 1862. But at every leisure moment he returns to his idea of producing "the Great American Novel". This chapter focuses on the debates about American literary nationalism. Hawthorne, the greatest of American imaginations, staggered under the load of the American novel. In The Scarlet letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance the authors have three delightful romances, full of acute spiritual analysis, of the light of other worlds, but also characterized by only a vague consciousness of the life, and by graspings that catch little but the subjective of humanity.
