This essay examines how nineteenth-century American literature paved the way for the modern exposure of private life in such disparate venues as the gossip column, social media, and reality television. In particular, this essay examines the sketch form, a popular nineteenth-century prose genre that has often been characterized as a minor form in comparison to the novel. In examining the history of the sketch form, this essay shows how the sketch conveyed reservations about the interiority and exposures central to the novel form. As practiced by Washington Irving, the earliest popularizer of this genre, the sketch advocated respectful discretion, the avoidance of private matters, and social stasis, the latter of which positioned the sketch in opposition to the social mobility characteristic of the novel. Irving presented the sketch as the genre of literary discretion, but its latter practitioner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, used the sketch to divulge confidences and violate social decorum. Willis adapted the sketch to become a precursor of the gossip column and to mirror the novel form in exposing private life.

This essay places the life and writings of Catharine Maria Sedgwick beside those of her contemporary, the Pequot preacher and author William Apess. Sedgwick’s novel Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts and many of her other writings reinforced the myth of the “vanishing Indian,” and yet native communities persisted in New England in Sedgwick’s own time. By reading Sedgwick and Apess alongside one another, this essay explores white historical fiction’s role in perpetuating settler colonial ideology and highlights Apess’s strategies of rhetorical and literary resistance. In his autobiography, his collection of native conversion narratives, his published sermons, and his political writings, Apess consistently recognized, embraced, and proclaimed not only his own worth as a native man but the survival and sovereignty of native New England communities both past and present.