Myths and Legends of Our Own Land

Charles M. Skinner was an American writer who was born in Victor, New York. His career in literature and journalism included editorship of the Brooklyn Eagle. His study of the paper’s famed Walt Whitman appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1903. Skinner published collections of myths, legends, and folklore found inside the United States and across the world. Skinner hoped that America’s progress would transform the nation’s legends into few but great ones – “as time goes on the figures seen against the morning twilight of our history will rise to more commanding stature.” He hoped to combine folklore conventions with New England transcendentalism to keep alive traditions endangered by the industrial age.