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Oh, wow, another literary maven! Shall we REALLY get off topic here? :-D

I can't agree with you about Hawthorne & Melville (as it happens, I studied them and their writings extensively in college.) Melville was indeed an odd bird, but there was a lot of insanity in his family -- his father and one of his sons died insane, and another son had some sort of neurological illness . . . I don't think his relationship with Hawthorne was as you suggest. Hawthorne I think recognized Melville's genius, but there was a severing of their relationship that MAY have been due to Hawthorne recoiling from Melville's intensity . . . but I think that's probably as far as it went. I don't know much about Melville's wife, although they lived with her family. Hawthorne was deeply in love with Sophia Peabody, and their marriage was a very happy one. So I don't really see it.

But I don't think any of the Transcendentalists had much of a connection with reality. New England was a hothouse of the sort of ethereal, scholarly folks who skated along on family largesse and do-nothing government posts. The outrageous Brook Farm experiment was just typical of their lack of ability to deal with the "real world." Hawthorne at least had the sense to get out, and wrote a very amusing roman a clef about it, in which all the leading Brook Farmites are easily recognizable. I agree by and large with Rudyard Kipling's assessment of New England in "Something of Myself." Pretty scathing indictment (fortunately he didn't spend any time in the South! :-) )

Actually the theory about Hawthorne and Melville having a relationship is fairly long standing. Of course, it's hard to establish absolute certainty of something like that, but you are correct in characterizing melville as odd. It is fairly certain that he did have some homo tendencies, and historians of literature have long acknowledged some of their themes in his writings. The historical theory that most likely explains the situation is that Melville had strong homosexual tendencies that attracted him to Hawthorne. Hawthorne was not very openly receptive to it though may have flirted with perverse tendencies of his own before rejecting it. Accordingly I don't think it out of the ordinary to characterize Melville as a perverted nutcase freak, and to some extent believe that Hawthorne may also be included in that category, though not near as much as Melville.

You hit the transcendentalist nail on the head. Out of touch with reality is it. They were little more than a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals who never grew up and could never figure out what to do with themselves.

As another poster remarked earlier in this thread, they seem to have leap frogged the country and established themselves in california, hence today's left coast wacko types.

To continue . . . Irving wasn't a New Englander, he was a New Yorker through and through, and Old New York at that. He was born in 1783 - a much, much earlier author although he didn't die until 1859, the works that brought him fame were published long before, beginning in 1809 and into the 1820s and 30s.

Hemingway and Steinbeck and Wilder were no more Yankees than I am a Tibetan nun. Wilder's dad married in 1860 and went west from Wisconsin, don't believe he fought, and certainly she was a frontier girl, not a Yankee. The others were just too late (heck, I REMEMBER both of them!)

I can't stand James Fenimore Cooper, he can't write for beans. Mark Twain was absolutely right about him, a waste of perfectly good ink. Check this out Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses

Ambrose Bierce, a brilliant but bitter and flawed man. He fought for the Union, but he wasn't Yankee or Southern, he hated everybody. He disappeared in Mexico in the teens, probably said something ugly to Pancho Villa.

Julia Ward Howe . . . ick. Fellow traveler with her repulsive husband.

Louisa Mae Alcott . . . overrated but an honest woman. (If Bronson Alcott had been your dad, you would have been a feminist, too, purely in the interests of survival.) I don't think she really WAS one, she was forced into it by circumstances. The portrait of Professor Bhaer in "Little Men" is the man she wished she could have married, sort of like her father with a SPINE, and she probably would have made him a good wife, too.

I can't agree that Emily Dickinson is boring. Strange, yes, very very strange in the good old New England tradition of women that nobody ever sees locked up in remote farmhouses. But not boring.

Walt Whitman . . . tireless self promoter and narcissist . . . good poet though, at least when not in the throes of self-infatuation. I know everybody thinks he was gay, but I think he was just bidding for attention. He served his time doing hospital work in the war, though, so I'll cut him plenty of slack for that.

Horatio Alger . . . a strange bird, but a writer for the masses who never read the Transcendentalists or the "Authors" with a capital "A". His books were didactic and always had a Moral (or two, or three) but boys who wouldn't read anything else read him and were edified thereby. I still read some of his stuff just for fun, now and then. A little of it goes a long way, but it's a nuts and bolts picture of life in New York from the point of view of a poor boy, and it must have been fascinating for his readers in small towns and sheltered families to learn how a boy "Cast Upon the Breakers" would go about finding a place to stay, a meal, and a job in the Big Bad City.

I haven't much use for Sandburg's poetry, by and large, but his "Rootabaga Stories" written for his kids (or grandkids, forget which) are magnificent nonsense and my children LOVED having them read out loud when they were growing up. I hate the new edition with the Michael Hague illustrations, they're totally at odds with the story (Hague can't help his illustrations looking sinister, I don't think). The original drawings are much better.