Emerson D is filled these days with English concentrators and dilettantes leaning forward to memorize Perry Miller's interpretations of the White Whale; Sever Hall draws about a roomful of the less dilettantish who wish to gain Kenneth Murdock's analyses of American literature to 1825; and the Coop is stocked with books by Faulkner, Twain, Hawthorne, Cooper, and the Puritan writers.

The student persuing the catalogue for a course on American literature has a difficult time. He is faced with choices, ranging from a survey course spanning the entire subject, to intensive graduate courses in Melville.

The student of 1895 looking for a course in American literature also had a difficult time, but in a different way. In 1895 no courses in American literature were given at Harvard, and no mention of American literature was made in the catalogue. Twenty-three years before, in 1872, Princeton reputedly initiated the study of American literature in America; but Harvard, home of many of the greatest American writers, would have nothing to do with it.

It was only the next year, in the fall of 1896 that there appeared in the catalogue any evidence that there was a literature in the United States. In that year, there is a notation at the end of the English section that graduates might engage in "special study" on the topic of American Literature with Professor Barrett Wendell. This is all.

Attempt at Americanism

In his Theory of American Literature, Howard Mumford Jones asserts that American academic aversion to its national literature was due to its abhorrence of the clean break which American authors were trying to make with European literary tradition. Noah Webster called for a purely American language, and a literature not based on "the mouldering pillars of antiquity."

To this, academicians replied that the literature which was being produced led to "disobedience to parents -- debaucheries -- prostitutions -- broken promises -- perjuries -- adulteries -- and other crimes too horrid to name ... caused by learning in and inculcated from this abominable library of hell."

Harvard piously avoided hell and confined itself to teaching safe Anglo-Saxon literature and language, plus a few scattered courses in more modern English writings.

Straw Beard and Cigarette

But there was a professor at Harvard with a straw-colored beard, who stalked through the Yard with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He--Barrett Wendell-- put an end to the university's avoidance of a national literature. His "special study" graduate course remained stubbornly alone in the catalogue until 1902, when it was joined by a course which has been given at Harvard, or at least listed in the catalogue, for 55 years: English 33hf, which was changed to English 7 in a general course renumbering in 1935. The course was called "The History of American Literature."

English 33hf was not actually given until 1905-06, though it appeared in the catalogue for three years preceding this time. A fall term course at first, it was given on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday at 11; its popularity may be indicated by the fact that it was given twice the following year. The year after it was first announced, English 33hf was joined by a third American literature course, English 45hf, "The Lives, Characters, and Times of Men of Letters, English and American." This was given by the beloved Charles Townsend ("Copey") Copeland.

Story of Men

But it was Wendell who can truly be called the founder, and the main supporter of American literature at Harvard in its early years. Kenneth Murdock has said that the history of the teaching of American literature at Harvard is not the story of "general attitudes, but of men," and Wendell is perhaps the prime example. An avowed Anglophile, his beard and spats gave him the appearance of "a real professor," in the words of one awed freshman in his course. It is told that upon walking into his first class of the term and being greeted by thunderous applause, he responded with an expression that was half annoyance and half bemusement, and bellowed, "For God's sake, gentlemen, don't make a noise!"

Wendell and "Copey" continued their trilogy alone until 1911, when the second great name in the teaching of American Literature at Harvard, Bliss Perry, began teaching a graduate course on Emerson. This was the first non-survey U.S. literature course to be offered and one of the few non-survey courses in the department. Survey courses, " in outline," were "the norm for college literature courses in that day," Murdock explains, adding, "I wouldn't be caught dead giving one like that now."

But the break in survey courses brought about by Perry's Emerson course was only temporary. Other survey-type courses in American literature were being added to the English Department. In 1914, "Puritanism in English and American Literature." Chester N. Greenough, the third "founder" of United States literature study here, taught that one.