Brahmin, member of any of several old, socially exclusive New England families of aristocratic and cultural pretensions, from which came some of the most distinguished American men of letters of the 19th century. Originally a humorous reference to the Brahmans, the highest caste of Hindu society, the term came to be applied to a number of prominent New England writers, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. All three were educated in Europe and became associated with Harvard University.
Assuming the role of arbiters of literary taste, they made Boston the literary capital of America in their day. Though they espoused democratic ideals, they remained aesthetically conservative. In an age that brought forth the masterpieces of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain, they advocated a genteel, rational humanism, quite out of step with their brilliant contemporaries. Nevertheless, the Brahmins exerted the main influence on American literary taste until the 1890s.