But the flower of American culture was its literature. To be sure Edgar Allan Poe, whose _Raven_ and short stories were ere long to give him the first rank among all American men of letters, had been suffered to starve in the midst of New York's millions in 1849, and Hawthorne found it very difficult to find the means of a meager livelihood in Massachusetts. If the _Raven_ and the _Scarlet Letter_ were born unwelcome, Ralph Waldo Emerson was making a living as author and sage of his generation, and there were others of the Transcendentalists--Thoreau, the woodland poet, Margaret Fuller, the woman knight-errant, recently drowned at sea, and Amos Bronson Alcott--whose writings appeared in standard editions and who lived by their pens. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a professor at Harvard till 1854, though savagely criticized by Poe and Margaret Fuller, had won the American heart in his _Village Blacksmith_ and _Evangeline_. He scored his greatest triumph in _Miles Standish_ in 1858. And another Harvard professor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was just coming into a national reputation in 1860 by his _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ and other similar writings. A more radical poet was John Greenleaf Whittier, contributor to the _National Era_, a radical anti-slavery journal which first gave publicity to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. Whittier's _Ichabod_, which appeared in 1850, and is already quoted in these pages, gave its author a devoted following among the radicals and hastened Webster to his grave. Mrs. Stowe's work was perhaps the most influential book ever written by an American, though it hardly ranks as literature. Of a similarly intense nature was James Russell Lowell, whose _Biglow Papers_ of 1846 to 1857 unmercifully lampooned the party which waged the war on Mexico and ridiculed the leaders of the South and West. Succeeding Longfellow at Harvard, Lowell helped to establish in 1857 the _Atlantic Monthly_, which still remains the best of American magazines. There was nowhere else in the country such a school of literary men as this of New England, though in Charleston William Gilmore Simms was still publishing historical novels, espousing the cause of Southern literature in _Russell's Magazine_, and stimulating the ambitions of young men. One of his pupils, Henry Timrod, whose _At Magnolia Cemetery_ is likely to prove immortal, was worthy to be compared with Poe; and another, Paul Hamilton Hayne, certainly deserved a higher rank and a better fortune than either of these struggling poets has been accorded. But perhaps the most original writings of the time were those of a certain group of obscure men in Georgia and the lower South. A. B. Longstreet, the author of _Georgia Scenes_, William Tappan Thompson, of _Major Jones's Courtship_, and Joseph B. Baldwin, of _Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi_, struck a rich vein of ludicrous humor which Mark Twain worked out after the war.