Literature

Nonfiction: Democracy in America (De la Démocratie en Amerique) by French political scientist Alexis (Charles-Henri-Maurice Clérel) de Tocqueville, 35, who traveled for 9 months in 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont through eastern Canada and various areas of the United States, including New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, and New Orleans on a commission to study the U.S penitentiary system (first volume of four; the fourth will be published in 1840). "Nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions . . . All classes meet continually and no haughtiness at all results from the differences in social position. Everyone shakes hands," writes de Tocqueville. But he foresees the rise of certain forces that will eventually undermine the principle of economic equality, and while the American passion for equality "tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great . . . there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." Tyranny of the majority is a possible hazard of democracy, de Tocqueville warns, but he notes that law, religion, and the press provide bulwarks against democratic despotism, as he will elaborate in his later volumes; The Vindication of the English Constitution by Benjamin Disraeli.

Fiction: "Berenice" by Edgar Allan Poe in the March issue of The Southern Literary Messenger; The Yemassee by Charleston, South Carolina-born novelist William Gilmore Simms, 29, whose story about Native Americans will make him widely known. Simms returns from New York to Charleston, where his first wife died 3 years ago and where he will soon marry the daughter of a rich planter.