Brackenridge, Hugh Henry. (1748 - 1816).
L i f e
- served subsequently as a minister, editor, writer, lawyer, and judge
- founded the Pittsburgh Gazette, the city’s first newspapaer
- also founded the United States Magazine, published poems by his friend Philip Freneau
- helped to established the today’s University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania)
W o r k
- his early work includes two patriotic plays and some verse
“A Poem on the Rising Glory of America”:
- in collaboration with P. Freneau
Modern Chivalry (1815):
< inspired by Tobias Smollett and Cervantes’s Don Quijote
- a satirical picaresque comedy in a vigorous style
- the first novelist treatment of the frontier: pictures backwoods life in America, and ridicules the excesses of a raw democracy
- captain Farrago = a bookish man of principle, travels with his Irish low and base servant to the American frontier
Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca in Arabia:
- an unfinished novel
Quote
"This servant of mine is but a bog-trotter, who can scarcely speak the dialect in which your laws ought to be written; but certainly he has never read a single treatise on any political subject; for the truth is, he cannot read at all".
From Modern Chivalry (1815).
Basics
(Picture: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
Hugh Henry Brackenridge. (1748 - 1816). American. -
Work
Novelist. Playwright. Poet. Founder of the Pittsburgh Gazette. -
Genres
Satire. Political writing.
Literature
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. London: Penguin, 1991.
Ruland, Richard, Malcolm Bradbury. Od puritanismu k postmodernismu. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997.
Vančura, Zdeněk, ed. Slovník spisovatelů: Spojené státy americké. Praha: Odeon, 1979.