Posted on July 4, 2026 at 8:00 AM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Want to celebrate America’s Independence Day the literary way? Boy, can we help!
This year, Literary Hub shared two particularly appropriate posts in honor of the occasion.
Professor Robert S. Levine made the case for reading Frederick Douglass's 1867 speech “Sources of Danger to the Republic” on this particular Fourth of July, as it's more relevant in this day and age than the traditionally cited “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.
And staffers also collected a huge assortment of links reflecting on American literature.
Today in literary history
July 4 also marks two literary milestones:
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau began his simple living experiment at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, on land that Ralph Waldo Emerson owned.
This, of course, resulted in the essay collection Walden, in which Thoreau wrote both philosophically about the meaning of work and leisure and practically about what it was like to live at Walden Pond.
Thoreau stayed in his shack for two-plus years, moving out of it and into the home that Emerson shared with his family on September 6, 1847. His only break came in 1846 ... in a jail cell.
He hadn't paid his poll tax in years and, upon being asked to do so, refused, so he was jailed until the next morning, when someone paid the tax on his behalf. The experience inspired his essay "Civil Disobedience."
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, History.com
In 1855, Walt Whitman self-published the anonymous first edition of Leaves of Grass.
The twelve poems were written in free verse, marking a sharp turn away from the style (and substance) of European literature.
Whitman revised and reissued the collection throughout his life, changing poem titles and adding works; after he died in 1892, yet another version came out with previously unpublished poems added, too.
Leaves of Grass, like many now-classic American works of literature, wasn't warmly received while Whitman was alive, and, in fact, was often banned in public libraries.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica
Categories: Today in Books