"Stern"? Have you ever actually been to New England?

Gosh, this is a new take on New England. So, the winters are cold; that's why God invented L.L. Bean. Hardly anyplace has more scenic weather though. If you think it's stern you're not looking.

And if you're going to count Dickinson and Melville as New Englanders, might as well count Poe too: Born in Boston. Hey, and don't forget Lovecraft.

While there is much that is ugly about early American history, the Salem Witch Trials were a minor incident when compared with what went on in Europe. Also, Cotton Mather warned against the use of spectral evidence in trials. My recollection is that when he learned such evidence had been used he disassociated himself from them.

As to the climate here (I live in Maine)with global warming it's becoming downright balmy.

I know that he's not as old school or canonical as frost, Hawthorne or Meville, but no "A Prayer for Owen Meaney?" That is probably the most New England novel I can think of,a more modern, and more witty, update on many of the themes mentioned. Read it!

I realize articles like this produce an endless stream of "You forgot my favorite author!" responses, but come on: winters and Puritans? Besides, there's a lot to like about winters and Puritans: winters give us an excuse to stay inside and drink, and the Puritan conscience shaped things like the Abolitionist movement.

I realize they're less weather and Protestant-centric, but what about H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, John Cheever or, for that matter, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac? And if you're looking for a non-fiction book that gives a great flavor for how New Englanders live, forget "Mayflower": Tracey Kidder's "Hometown" can't be beat.

And how a lad from the Connecticut shoreline could forget Eugene O'Neill is beyond me...

True, much American writing did come out of New England. But Gates's literary history is painfully outdated (carbon dating places his ideas at about 1947). Puritanism plays big because of a few authors--mainly Hawthorne. But Hawthorne sold poorly his whole life. New Englander Harriet Beecher Stowe was the blockbuster writer and, though a devout Christian, was no Puritan.

The theology of the Puritans disappeared from major American thought following the Revolutionary War. America was Christian, but Evangelical, and predominantly Presbyterian and Methodist (I don't claim this as a better religious ancestry, just a truer one). If certain famous authors have shown an imagination haunted by American Purtianism it is idiosyncratic to the whole of American thought. Reading the novels popular in the era (rather than those canonized later) paints a very different picture.

Gates must have recently dusted off his copy of "The American Renaissance." This is some shoddy writing for Salon.

Agreeing with each and every letter posted so far I would like to add one more name to Gates' ommission: Edna St. Vincent Millay. How Gates can ignore so many fine, almost ecstatically sensual writers (and virtually dismissing Wallace Stevens) who took from the New Endland landscape a sense of ephemeral joy not present anywhere else in the world, is beyond comprehension. Millay was a writer of extraodinary beauty, and lived a life that would be compelling by today's standards. Her description of springtime in New England, full of ache and glory?

April this year, not otherwise / Than April of a year ago, / Is full of whispers, full of sighs, / Of dazzling mud and dingy snow; / Herpaticas that pleased you so / Are here again, and butterflies.

Ethan Frome is taught in Junior High, because it is wooden and two-dimensional, much like Gates' overly-tragic/romantic perception of the great white northeast.

I have to agree with the other comments - this was a tired, unoriginal list. I would agree with Hawthorne (though probably not the Scarlet Letter - Young Goodman Brown, yes) and Frost. Walden, too, of course. But I would also agree with the person who suggested the non-canonical, but deeply New England, Prayer for Owen Meany. I would suggest the first, Maine-centered half of food writer John Thorne's Serious Pig, which gives a better sense of life in Maine than most travel books or novels. Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms is essential and would make a nice back-to-back with Our Town, another New England classic. Jack Kerouac's Visions of Lowell is must. Andre Dubus' short stories are rooted in Catholic New England, specifically the area around the Merrimack river. I'm sure with a little thinking and research I could come up with more; it's too bad the author of this piece didn't bother.

Yes, agreed, lots and lots and lots of books come from New England, and too bad Mr. Gates didn't realize that all his readers wanted was a list rather than a well-argued essay. Why bother working at a piece when all anybody is going to do is look for their own favorite titles and maybe a few key words to argue with? Maybe I only feel like defending Gates because one of the first books that comes to my mind when I think about New England literature is Moby Dick. I have other favorites that Gates doesn't mention, including Dubus and, hey, guess what, nobody so far has accused Gates of being an idiot for not mentioning Russell Banks -- or himself! On the other hand, why do I need Gates to tell me about authors I already know about? I don't get the sense that he thinks the authors he discusses will be new to anybody. What he is saying, at least in part, is that, given the impact the original New England culture had on the country as a whole and on our sense of ourselves as Americans, it is instructive and useful to see its literary products as having a long but direct connection to those roots. Then he shows what that connection is in the books he has selected to discuss. That the argument goes back to 1947 (really, only that far?) doesn't make it not true. And at least it's an argument. "You didn't describe New England as I would have" doesn't constitute much of a rebuttal.