. . . "The emergence and later (often much later) canonization of such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Henry James seem, at least in retrospect, to mark the certain beginnings of a consequential and lasting national literary heritage, as do the retrieval and republication of earlier American authors in projects like Charles L. Webster and Company's am" . . . .