pastoral poetry, or more exactly pastoral song, if "Song of the Chatahoochee" is any guide. Emma Lazarus's place in defining core American values is reflected in the fact that "The New Colossus" is as it were literally a part of the symbolic structure of the Statue of Liberty. Dunbar, who was one generation removed from the slavery into which his parents had been born and whose command of Negro dialect as well as conventional diction seem meant to describe the experience of persistent oppression mediated only by an encoded coping and survival strategy such as "wear[ing] the mask that grins and lies" (Dunbar 204).
The fiction and nonfiction of the last half of the century reflects a break from the "climate of an American romanticism to assert the significance of the democratic self" (Elliott, Kerber, Litz, and Martin 206). The nonfiction of Henry Adams, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Frank Norris each in its way describes immediate realities of individual judgment of the potentialities and failures of the American experience and values. Adams's des
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