Niagara Falls
Literature

The Niagara Falls area features as the base camp for a German aerial invasion of the United States in the H. G. Wells novel The War in the Air. Many poets have been inspired to write about the falls. Among them was the Cuban poet José Maria Heredia, who wrote the poem "Niagara". There are commemorative plaques on both sides of the falls recognizing the poem. In 1818, American poet John Neal published the poem "Battle of Niagara," which is considered the best poetic description of Niagara Falls up to that time. In 1835, as a poetical illustration "The Indian Girl" to accompany a plate of the Horse-Shoe Falls —artist Thomas Allom, Letitia Elizabeth Landon imagines an Indian girl who, having saved the life of a captured young European man, takes him as her husband only to be later abandoned by him. In her despair she guides her canoe over the falls in dramatic fashion: 'Upright, within that slender boat, they saw the pale girl stand, her dark hair streaming far behind—uprais’d her desperate hand.'

Lydia Sigourney wrote two dramatic poems on the falls, Niagara, in 1836 and again in her Scenes in my native Land, Niagara, in 1845. In 1848, the Rev. C. H. A. Bulkley, of Mount Morris, New York published Niagara: A Poem, a 132-page, 3,600 line blank verse poem presenting the wonders of the falls as "the theme of a single poem."

In 1893, Mark Twain wrote a satirical sketch called "The First Authentic Mention of Niagara Falls," in which Adam and Eve are living at the Falls.
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