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Oliver Wendell Holmes |
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For nearly a quarter of a century, from the publication in 1858 of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table until his resignation form the Harvard Medical School in 1882, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes dominated the intellectual life of Boston and Cambridge. Unlike his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who brought a symbolic dimension to the art of prose fiction, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, who transformed the consciousness of his audience through the essay, Holmes left no distinctive mark on any single literary form. Yet at one time his influence as an essayist rivaled that of Emerson, his novels were compared favorably with Hawthorne's, and he was unofficially regarded as the poet laureate of Boston. What was it about Holmes's work that gave it such enormous popularity and unmistakable prestige? For one thing, Holmes never divorced himself from his writing. Whether he adopted the mask of the Autocrat or the Professor or the Poet, as he did in the breakfast-table series, his subject was always the same: "A Boswell, writing out himself!" The memory of his early exposure to Calvinism (Abiel Holmes, his father, was minister of the First Church in Cambridge) never left him: "When it came to the threats of future punishment as described in the sermons of the more hardened theologians, my instincts were shocked and disgusted beyond endurance." And it provided him with his one great subject.
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