placing on the shelves of any library save as a 'believe it or not' specimen". In an 1848 poem, James Russell Lowell classified Neal as "a man who made less than he might have" who was good at "whisking out flocks of comets, but never a star" because he was "too hasty to wait till Art's ripe fruit should drop", and concluded that "could he only have waited he might have been great". Influence Neal's creative work had indirect influence on many writers during and after his life. Seba Smith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are all known to have enjoyed and been influenced by Neal's early poems and novels. Smith is most famous for his "Jack Downing" humor series, which was likely influenced by Neal's humorous use of regional dialect. It is also likely that Edgar Allan Poe developed many of his characteristic traits as a writer under the influence of Neal's articles in The Yankee in the late 1820s. Many scholars conclude that most defining authors of the mid-nineteenth-century American renaissance earned their reputations by employing techniques learned from Neal's work earlier in the century, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. Biographer Benjamin Lease pointed to Neal's comparatively better remembered immediate predecessors, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, as lacking an obvious link to those mid-century masters that Neal clearly demonstrates. He further argued that Neal's ability to influence such disparate figures as Poe and Whitman demonstrates the weight of his work. Historical status Aligned with their twentieth-century predecessors, both Lease and Sears in the 1970s classified John Neal as a transitional figure in literature who came after the initial wave of British-imitating American literature but before the great American Renaissance that occurred after Neal had published the bulk of his work. More recent scholarship placed Neal "Not exactly 'beneath' the 'American Renaissance, but "scattered across it." American literature scholars Edward Watts, David J. Carlson, and Maya Merlob contended that Neal was written out of the Renaissance because of his distance from the Boston-Concord circle and his utilization of popular styles and modes viewed at a lower artistic level. Selected works Novels Keep Cool, A Novel (1817) Full text Logan, a Family History (1822) Full text Seventy-Six (1823) Full text Randolph, A Novel (1823) Full text Errata; or, the Works of Will. Adams (1823) Full text Brother Jonathan: or, the