20-year-old Edgar Allan Poe publishes Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems

Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem 'Old Ironsides' prompts a public response that saves the frigate from the scrapyard

Samuel Francis Smith's patriotic hymn America is sung for the first time on July 4 in Boston

Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem The Last Leaf is inspired by an aged survivor of the Boston Tea Party

American novelist William Gilmore Simms publishes Guy Rivers, the first of his series known as the Border Romances

The Partisan, set in South Carolina, launches the series of novels by William Gilmore Simms known as the Revolutionary Romances

In his essay, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson sets out the fundamentals of the philolosphy of Transcendentalism

In The American Scholar Ralph Waldo Emerson urges his student audience to heed their own intellectuals rather than those of Europe

In his Divinity School Address, delivered at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson criticizes formal religion and gives priority to personal spiritual experience

US author Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes Fanshawe, his first novel, at his own expense

Edgar Allan Poe publishes a characteristically gothic tale, The Fall of the House of Usher

The first issue of the quarterly magazine The Dial is issued by the Transcendentalists meeting at Ralph Waldo Emerson's home

US lawyer Richard Henry Dana has immediate popular success with Two Years Before the Mast, his account of his time as a merchant seaman

Herman Melville goes to sea on the whaler Acushnet and spends moe than a year in the south Pacific

August Dupin solves the case in Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered to be the first example of a detective story

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems includes 'The Village Blacksmith' and 'The Wreck of the Hesperus'

US social reformer Catherine Beecher publishes an influential book to empower women, Treatise on Domestic Economy

Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Pit and the Pendulum, a cliff-hanging tale of terror at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition

William Hickling Prescott brings the Conquistadors dramatically to life in his 3-volume History of the Conquest of Mexico

Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven and Other Poems

Henry David Thoreau moves into a hut that he has built for himself in the woods at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts

Escaped slave Frederick Douglass publishes the first of three volumes of autobiograrphy

US author Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an early and thoughtful feminist study of women's place in society

Francis Parkman travels west into dangerous territory in Wyoming, an adventure he later describes in The Oregon Trail

Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his first collection of poems, many of which have appeared first in The Dial