This project expands on classical receptions in Early America among the elite, and suggest:Americans re-formed their receptions on many levels, characteristic, linguistic, moral, etc., from previous European receptions, during and after the Revolution. And among these, each who wrote about the events at hand provides us with a unique perspective on them and on the values and character traits by which they were processed and addressed, relative to the average on a spectrum of manhood and virtue, particularly martial virtue.

American authors, as this examination demonstrates, were variously occupied with a constantly changing spectrum of manhood and manly virtue. Their own lives and conceptions of the world around them, their thoughts on political and military problems of the times, and their position between Leverenz’ patrician and artisan classes were instrumental to their production of literature, and the major principles they expressed within it. Brackenridge and Barlow are examples representative of the variety of opinions on physical martial prowess and learned gentlemanliness, and the early importance of balancing these in the mid-to-late eighteenth century; Key is one of the first whose concern for the justification of his absence from the physical realm of manhood showed a certain decline, which trend continued into the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, as an examination of the life and literature of Key shows, the emphasis on presence of and adherence to some code of martial values, which usually was tied to some balance of Christianity and Classics, was still imperative until American Literature progressed some distance through the 1800’s. Until then, however varied or contested, Classics remained an influence, whether by choice or by curricular growth, on its authors, on their values and on those works of literature they produced.