American Fiction: The First Seventy-Five Years.

The article presents the transcript of an address given to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts by Clifton Waller Barrett in October of 1953, discussing the first 75 years of American fiction. In it the development of short stories and published fiction in the United States is charted from the first published work in 1774 by Francis Hopkinson to the established genre and works such as those of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.