American Romanticism Literary Events By katedickey15 1817 William Cullen Bryant publishes "Thanatopsis" 1820 Washington Irving publishes The Sketch Book 1823 James Fenimore Cooper publishes The Pioneers 1828 Noah Webster publishes a landmark dictionary of American English 1830 Oliver Wendell Holmes publishes "Old Ironsides" 1833 John Greenleaf Whittier publishes Justice and Expediency in which he calls for the abolition of slavery 1835 France's Alexis de Toqueville publishes Democracy in America 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his first collection, Essays, including "Self Reliance" and The Over-Soul" 1845 Margaret Fuller publishes Women in the Nineteenth Century 1845 Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven and Other Poems 1848 James Russell Lowell publishes The Biglow Papers, poems opposing the Mexican War 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes The Scarlet Letter 1851 Herman Melville publishes The Whale, or Moby-Dick 1854 Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden 1855 Walt Whitman publishes the first edition of his book of poems, Leaves of Grass 1858 Emily Dickinson begins to copy her poems into bound booklets 1858 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes The Courtship of Miles Standish