American Literature: Prose

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Regionalism

Post-Civil War America was large and diverse enough to sense its own local differences. With increasing urbanization and more accessible transportation, small, rural communities became a subject of literary interest. As early as 1820 America had developed a taste for fiction with specific, localized settings and topics. Toward mid-century, regional voices had emerged from newly settled territories in the South and to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. In many of these works local dialects, sayings, and spellings were used for humorous effect. Among the successful publications of early regionalists were Georgia Scenes (1835) by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, an anthology called The Big Bear of Arkansas and Other Sketches (1845), and Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845) by Johnson Hooper, which was set in Alabama.

Mary Wilkins Freeman, best known for A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), and Sarah Orne Jewett, best known for Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), both wrote about rural northern New England. The first audiences for their stories were not their own communities, however. The stories found their readership among the urbane readers of New York City’s Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Boston’s Atlantic Monthly magazine.

Tales of the West also became a popular form of regional writing and created frontier outlaws and heroes, such as Billy the Kid. These tales were especially suited to the short-story form. Foremost among writers who contributed to legends about the West was Bret Harte, especially in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870), a collection of stories about California. Beginning in 1860 the publishing house of Beadle and Adams introduced dime novels—inexpensive tales with exciting plots intended for popular consumption. The first dime novels were set during key events of early American history such as the Revolutionary War, but plots soon incorporated frontier lore, conflicts between cowboys and Indians, and the taming of the West for white settlement. Dime novels may be seen as precursors of the Western, a genre that would reach the height of its popularity in the first half of the 20th century.

In the second half of the 19th century, issues specific to the industrial city also engaged writers of fiction, who portrayed the sometimes hidden struggles of city life. “Life in the Iron Mills” by Rebecca Harding Davis was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861. It was an important early realist representation of the long hours, drudgery, and bleak future of factory workers. Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) by Edward Bellamy compared an egalitarian and socialist vision of America as it might be in the year 2000 to the very real miseries of urban life in the 1880s.

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Kate Chopin built her reputation on regionalist stories of Louisiana, for example, in the collection Bayou Folk (1894). She is, however, best remembered for writing one of the first important feminist novels, The Awakening (1899). The book realistically depicts Creole life in Louisiana as it tells the story of a young woman in a stultifying marriage who discovers a new sense of self when she takes a lover.

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Realism and Naturalism: Twain, Crane, and Others

Realism entered American literature after the Civil War, soon followed by naturalism, an extreme form of realism. Naturalism had an outlook often bleaker than that of realism, and it added a dimension of predetermined fate that rendered human will ultimately powerless.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, is sometimes called a regionalist for his vivid portrayals of Southern character and dialect. However, he also ranks among the great American realists because he scrupulously included so many sides of life in his works and refused to make the horrifying look palatable. He published from 1865 until 1910, but his literary fame was firmly rooted in the 19th century and its crises of racism, class conflicts, and poverty. Twain's works also include some of the best American humor, starting with the short story 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which was published in a newspaper in 1865. Twain’s best-known works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), are seemingly simple stories that also offer searing indictments of corruption at all levels of society. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer celebrated boyhood at the same time that it cleverly revealed the workings of small-town America—small-minded at times, generous in spirit at other times. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered Twain’s masterpiece. In it, the boy Huck Finn learns about human nature’s evil side as well as its kind side. As a result of his close friendship with a black man who is escaping slavery, Huck also must confront the conflict between individual intuition about what is right and the prevailing views of society on the subject.

In both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Twain's genius comes through in his realistic depiction of the psychology and the moral development of his two young characters. Both works are similar in this way to Little Women (1868-1869), a novel by Louisa May Alcott that records the moral and intellectual coming of age of four young women. Alcott was the daughter of transcendentalist Bronson Alcott. Her still-popular novel is one of a series of works that show her serious concern with childhood and adolescence.

In addition to Twain, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris are notable late-19th-century American writers in the realist or naturalist traditions. Howells, a noted literary critic and novelist, was a friend of Twain’s and along with him pioneered realism in American literature. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howells’s best known novel, is the study of a self-made businessman who is ultimately ruined financially by his determination not to compromise his integrity.

Despite an early death at the age of 29, Crane published several brilliant although grim stories. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the story of a doomed young woman’s life in a New York City slum, is so bleak that Crane had difficulty finding a publisher. His second work, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is an intense examination of the psychology of fear and the state of the human mind during war; it met with immediate success. Norris's best-known works were McTeague (1899), a portrait of the effects of greed, and The Octopus (1901), which depicts the conflict between farmers and the railroad over land and power in California. His works reflect his concern with social and economic forces and their effect on human lives.

A less well-known writer in the realist tradition at the end of the century was Frances E. W. Harper, an African American woman born free in the former slave state of Maryland. An early black activist, Harper was a successful and frequent public speaker on behalf of the rights of blacks and of women. Her novel Iola Leroy, or The Shadows Uplifted (1892) tells the story of a woman of mixed racial ancestry who is freed from slavery, serves as a nurse during the Civil War, and is eventually reunited with her family after the war.

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Modernism: The 1900s

During the 20th century a communications revolution that introduced motion pictures, radio, and television brought the world into view—and eventually into the living room. The new forms of communication competed with books as sources of amusement and enlightenment. New forms of communication and new modes of transportation made American society increasingly mobile and familiar with many more regions of the country. Literary voices from even the remotest corners could reach a national audience. At the same time, American writers—particularly writers of fiction—began to influence world literature.

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Fiction: 1900 to 1945

The 20th century saw the emergence of modernism. Modernism responded to the world’s complexity by asserting that the individual had the potential to achieve a broader perspective than that offered by any one society or its history. Although realism, naturalism, and regionalism were still viable modes of expression, they reflected the increasingly complex reality of 20th-century society. Immigration and industrialization led to increasing urbanization, and, in turn, to class stratification. At the beginning of the 19th century, American authors struggled to convince the world that they had a history; by the 20th century, American authors, like European authors, had to grapple with more than enough history.

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Psychological Realism

Henry James was a key figure in American literature’s transition from the 1800s to the 1900s. Although more of his novels were published before 1900 than after, his style, which was characterized by psychological rather than physical realism, and his themes seemed a long way from much of 19th-century American literature. James’s use of American and European subject matter and perspectives, as well as his sense of the complexities of both individual and cultural history, make him a modernist and a writer the 20th century can claim as one of its literary representatives. Like many of his characters, Henry James lived an international life, and his novels moved away from the 19th century’s concern with American settings. Instead, many of his novels are animated by a complex interplay and at times conflict between the appeal of an older European culture and a younger American idealism. This interplay is present in such novels as The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Ambassadors (1903). Over time James moved toward ever greater subtlety of insight and precision of statement, and his later novels, such as The Golden Bowl (1904), became increasingly concerned with the mysteries of human passion.

Edith Wharton, whose works show the influence of James, was another key turn-of-the-century figure. Many of her novels take place among the wealthy and worldly elite of New York City and focus on the restrictions imposed on individuals by social definition and convention. Two of her best-known works, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), examine these conventions and their tragic consequences. In the emotionally wrenching love story Ethan Frome (1911), which is written from a man’s perspective in a bleak, rural New England setting, Wharton studied the mental and emotional traps that limit people’s desire and ability to change.

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