of minimally educated book buyers, thereby intending to guarantee the existence of an American national literature by ensuring its economic viability. Starting in the late 1820s, Neal shifted his focus from nationalism to regionalism to challenge the rise of Jacksonian populism in the US by showcasing and contrasting coexisting regional and multicultural differences within the United States. The collection of essays and stories he published in his magazine The Yankee "lays the groundwork for reading the nation itself as a collection of voices in conversation" and "asks readers to decide for themselves how to manage the multiple and contending sides of a federal union." To preserve variations in American English he feared might disappear in an increasingly nationalist climate, he became one of the first writers to employ colloquialism and regional dialects in his writing. Literary criticism Neal used literary criticism in magazines and novels to encourage desired changes in the field and to uplift new writers, most of them women. Noted for his "critical vision", Neal expressed judgments that were widely accepted in his lifetime. "My opinion of other [people's] writings", he said, "has never been ill received; and in every case... my judgment has been confirmed, sooner or later, without a single exception." Fred Lewis Pattee corroborated this statement seventy years after Neal's death: "Where he condemned, time has almost without exception condemned also." As an American literary nationalist, he called for "faithful representations of native character" in literature that utilize the "abundant and hidden sources of fertility... in the northern, as well as the southern Americas". His American Writers essay series in Blackwood's Magazine (1824) is the earliest written history of American literature, and was reprinted as a collection in 1937. Neal dismissed almost all of the 120 authors he critiqued in that series as derivative of their British predecessors. John Neal used his role as critic, particularly in the pages of his magazine The Yankee, to draw attention to newer writers in whose work he saw promise. John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow all received their first "substantial sponsorship or praise" in the magazine's pages. When submitting poetry to Neal for review, Whittier made the request, "if you don't like it, say so privately; and I will quit poetry, and everything also of a literary nature". Poe was Neal's most historically impactful discovery and when he quit poetry for short