Introduction to American Literature

American Literature

1865–1914

THE TRANSFORMATION OF A NATION

From the earliest moment of settlement in what would become the United States, the nation’s borders were relentlessly pushed westward. Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase (1803) added a huge swath of territory west of the Alleghenies; the outcome of the Mexican War (1846–48) brought the entire Southwest, including California, into the nation; and the discovery of gold in California in 1848 increased the pace of westward movement beyond anything that could have been imagined even one year earlier. White Americans, mostly of English, Scottish, German, and French descent, settled across these regions, increasing the pace by which the U.S. government was forcibly relocating Native American tribes—the term was Removal and the practice had begun in the 1830s—from their homelands to places further west, and attempting to force Hispanic Americans south of the new border with Mexico. As these settlers moved into the extensive terrain west of the Mississippi River, they leveled vast stands of timber, exterminated the buffalo and other wild game in favor of cattle and sheep, and established farms, villages, cities and the railroads that linked them to markets in the Midwest and East. New technologies converted the country’s immense natural resources into industrial products both for its own burgeoning population and for foreign consumers.

The Civil War (1861–65), the seemingly inevitable result of growing economic, political, social, and cultural divisions between North and South, cost some eight billion dollars and claimed more than six hundred thousand lives. Its savagery seems also to have left the p. 4 p. 4 p. 1266 country morally exhausted. Nevertheless, the country prospered materially over the next five decades, as the war effort had stimulated innovations in methods of efficiently moving large numbers of people, raw materials, and goods. The first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869 with the use of poorly paid laborers from China brought in through Western seaports—especially in San Francisco and Seattle—made it possible to cross the country quickly and inexpensively. The railroad also allowed for rapid, inexpensive shipments of goods, thereby moving the American economy itself into the industrial age, once and for all. The telegraph, introduced in the 1840s, now ran into small towns (many of them newly settled); electricity was introduced on a large scale; and around the end of the nineteenth century the telephone began to revolutionize daily life. Coal, oil, iron, gold, silver, and other kinds of mineral wealth were discovered and extracted, producing many individual fortunes that helped to capitalize further development. Such development required more people, preferably (from the point of view of employers) in numbers sufficient to keep down the cost of labor. Often lured by advertisements from railroad and land companies, immigrants arrived in the United States from the Scandinavian countries beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, and in the 1880s to the turn of the century and beyond, from eastern and southern European countries like Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and Russia. Many European newcomers, taking advantage of the railroads, went to the plains to farm; but most became urban dwellers, causing enormous population growth in such cities as New York, Boston, and Chicago at the same time that Chinese and then Japanese immigrants hastened the growth of San Francisco and other Western cities.

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893 that the Western frontier, which he regarded as crucial to the formation of America’s democratic p. 5 p. 5 p. 1267 character, no longer existed. He based his analysis on the census of 1890, which found no place in the United States with fewer than two people per square mile. (Native Americans were not counted in this estimate.) Now the United States, eager to compete with European nations, attempted to expand its influence beyond its continental borders, looking to gain the former Spanish possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War in 1898. U.S. colonization also included Hawaii, annexed as a colony in 1898. The effects of American expansionism had long been experienced by indigenous peoples. From the time of the earliest treaties with the United States, Native nations agreed to cede large tracts of land with some territory specifically “reserved” for themselves. What we currently think of as Indian reservations came about as a result of President Ulysses S. Grant’s policies of the late 1860s, which sought—and mostly forced—the agreement of various Native nations to limit themselves to lands designated by the federal government. Around this time, anthropologists (then known as ethnologists) began to study tribal lifeways, especially of the Zuni and other tribes of the Southwest. In 1883, two years after Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor surveyed the history of whites’ treaty-breaking behavior with the Indians, an organization of eastern philanthropists calling itself “Friends of the Indian” began to agitate in favor of assimilating Native Americans into the white mainstream. This organization meant well, but its methods inevitably devalued Native ways of life in favor of white schooling, white patterns of town settlement and agriculture, and above all white religion. Throughout this period, however, Native writers such as Zitkala Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), a Lakota woman, insisted on contributing to the national discussion, speaking in their own voices in published texts as they had been doing at least since the 1830s.

At the same time that the frontier came to be regarded as a crucial constituent of American identity, industrialization on a scale unprecedented p. 6 p. 1268 in Great Britain and Europe came to the fore in the United States. (Some historians believe that the frontier myth served to mask the reality of the industrial economy.) Between 1850 and 1880, capital invested in manufacturing more than quadrupled and factory employment nearly doubled. By 1885 four transcontinental railroad lines had been completed, using in their own construction and carrying to manufacturing centers in Cleveland and Detroit the nation’s quintupled output of steel from Pittsburgh and Chicago. Major industries were consolidated into monopolies, allowing a small number of men to control such enormously profitable enterprises as steel, oil, railroads, meatpacking, banking, and finance, among them Jay Gould, Jim Hill, Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. Called “robber barons” by some and celebrated as captains of industry by others, these men squeezed out competitors and accumulated vast wealth and power. The new millionaires formed a wealthy class whose style of life, reported on in the mass media, offered a startling contrast to the lives of ordinary people.

But the ordinary was by the end of the century a quite different thing from what it had been before or shortly after the Civil War. In 1865 the United States, except for the manufacturing centers of the northeastern seaboard, was still a country of farms, villages, and small towns. Manufacturing was more a matter of workshops than factories. In 1870 the U.S. population was 38.5 million; by 1910, 92 million; by 1920, 123 million. This increase in population was due almost entirely to the arrival of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe: Russia, Poland, Italy, and the Balkan nations. The percentage of city versus country dwellers was reversed as cities like New York grew from half a million to nearly 3.5 million between 1865 and the turn of the twentieth century. Chicago, with a population of only 29,000 in 1850, had more than 2 million inhabitants by 1910. These immigrants and their descendants enabled the United States to become an urban, industrial, international, capitalist power while altering the ethnic composition of the still mostly white population and contributing immeasurably, albeit not without considerable conflict, to the democratization of the nation’s cultural life. By 1890, New Englanders and their now-scattered descendants were no longer numerically dominant.

This transformation of the continent brought hardships for many. Farmers in the Midwest and High Plains depended on the railroads for transport of their crops but were squeezed off the land by the pricing policies of these very same railroads—what the novelist Frank Norris characterized as the giant “octopus” of corporate power wielded by the Southern Pacific and other railroads. Though the Homestead Act of 1862 promised free or cheap acreage to every individual or family who would settle and “improve” land according to a set formula, much of the available land was donated to railroads to encourage their growth. Speculators bought land as well. It is estimated that only 10 percent of the land opened by the Homestead Act actually went to would-be independent farmers. Buying at high prices, or forced to rent, such farmers were “under the lion’s paw,” as the midwestern writer Hamlin Garland put it, of land speculators and absentee landlords, or faced with mortgage payments they could not make. Large-scale farming took over from the family farm, increasing agricultural yields but displacing many farmers who joined the population of the cities. These cities were also, as the socialist novelists Jack London and Upton Sinclair argued—adapting the ideas of Darwin to the social field—“jungles” where only the strongest, most ruthless, and luckiest survived. Wages were low, and workers faced inhumane and dangerous working conditions; at this time there were few laws regulating safety and working hours. In addition, the 1890s saw severe economic depressions caused by changes to the gold standard, overspeculation by banks and investors in railroads, sporadic droughts, and foreign debts.

Neither farmers nor urban laborers organized effectively to pursue their own interests. Legislators usually favored business and industry, sometimes in the honest belief that a healthy economy required capitalism, sometimes via bribery and kickbacks—as in President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, or in the looting of the New York City treasury by William Marcy (“Boss”) Tweed in the 1870s, or in municipal corruption cases exposed by the journalist Lincoln Steffens and other “muckrakers” including Stephen Crane and Frank Norris. Early attempts by labor to organize were often violent, and such groups as the terroristic “Molly Maguires,” active in the 1870s and 1880s in the coal-mining area of northeastern Pennsylvania, bolstered the conviction of those who believed in open markets and free enterprise that labor organizations were un-American. Industrial workers had little political leverage before the 1880s, when the American Federation of Labor emerged as the first unified voice of workers. But not until collective bargaining legislation was enacted in the 1930s did labor acquire the right to strike. As for farmers, their organizing efforts involved experiments in cooperative farming and storage, which usually failed—partly for lack of funds but also because of the long tradition of independence among agricultural people. It was with the hope of owning one’s own land that immigrants and native-born white people had moved to the prairies in the first place. On the other hand, individual ownership of land parcels was forced on many Native American nations through the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887—an outgrowth of “Friends of the Indian” policies. Whatever the intentions of the Dawes Act, it fragmented the collectively held Native lands and reduced the Native land base by some 90 million acres.

THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE

The rapid transcontinental settlement and new urban industrial conditions summarized above had a significant impact on the literature of the time. New themes, new forms, new subjects, new regions, new authors, and new audiences all emerged in the half century following the Civil War. In fiction, characters rarely represented before the Civil War became familiar figures: industrial workers and the rural poor, ambitious business leaders and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers. Women from many social groups, African Americans, Native Americans, ethnic minorities, immigrants: all wrote for publication, and a rapidly burgeoning market for printed works helped establish authorship as a possible career for many.

Newspapers had been important to the political, social, and cultural life of America since colonial times, but after the Civil War their numbers and influence grew. Joseph Pulitzer established the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1878, and in 1883 he bought the New York World; both papers were hugely successful. William Randolph Hearst, a Californian who inherited a fortune from his mining entrepreneur father, made the San Francisco Examiner the dominant newspaper in California, then bought the New York Journal in 1895 to compete with Pulitzer’s World, and gradually acquired newspapers across the country. In 1897 the Jewish Daily Forward, in Yiddish, was founded by Abraham Cahan; its circulation eventually reached 250,000, and it was read by three or four times that number. Many of the noted authors of the period started as newspaper journalists: Abraham Cahan, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sui Sin Far, Joel Chandler Harris, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, and Mark Twain among them. Perhaps of equal importance to the development of literary careers and literature as an American institution was the establishment of newspaper syndicates in the 1880s by Irving Bachellor and S. S. McClure. These syndicates distributed material to newspapers and magazines in all sections of the country, publishing humor, news, and serialized novels such as Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.

Magazines had become important in American life by the mid-eighteenth century, but they too increased in number and scope. New York City and Boston magazines such as Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1850), Scribner’s Monthly (1870), Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (1881), the Atlantic Monthly (1857), and the Galaxy (1866) published work by Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala Ša, and Mark Twain. In San Francisco, the Overland Monthly (1868) emerged as the leading western literary periodical with a regional focus; it published Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Mary Austin, Sui Sin Far, and Mark Twain among others. Without these periodicals, many writers would not have been able to support themselves; the income and audiences were crucial to the further formation of the complex literary tradition of a vast nation undergoing modernization.

Periodicals also contributed to the emergence of what the critic Warner Berthoff has called “the literature of argument”—writings in sociology, philosophy, and psychology impelled by the spirit of exposure and reform. It would be hard to exaggerate the influence—on other writers as well as on the educated public—of works such as Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879), Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898), Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). For many women writers, magazines provided an important public space for exploring new perspectives on gender and women’s rights.

As the United States became an international political, economic, and military power during this half century, editors and readers welcomed (in translation) works by the leading European figures of the time, such as Russians Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and French novelist Émile Zola. American writers during this period increasingly adopted the form of realism—itself a product of the interplay of historical forces and aesthetic developments early apparent in the French writer Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (serialized in 1856, published as a book in 1857), which followed the mundane although ultimately tragic life of an ordinary housewife. Among the most critically praised American writers of the period were Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, who encompassed literary style from the comic vernacular through ordinary discourse to impressionistic subjectivity, while still under the sway of literary realism. These writers, two from the Midwest (Twain and Howells) and two from the East Coast (James and Wharton), recorded life on the vanishing frontier, in the village, small town, and turbulent metropolis, as well as in European resorts and capitals. They established the literary identity of distinctively American protagonists, specifically the vernacular boy hero and the “American Girl,” the baffled and strained middle-class family, the businessman, and the psychologically complicated citizens of a new international culture. They set the example and charted the future course for the subjects, themes, techniques, and styles of the U.S. fiction we still call modern.

Developments in the literary marketplace and in the nation’s preoccupations had the effect of greatly enhancing the reputation of prose fiction—the idea of a “great” American novel was first enunciated soon after the Civil War. But two of the most important American writers of their time and beyond, both of whom began working before the Civil War, were devoted to the idea that poetry was a crucial expression of the human spirit. In different ways each pointed towards the huge renaissance of poetry after World War I. Walt Whitman promulgated an expansive, gregarious open form fit for the “open road” of American life; Emily Dickinson’s tight, elliptical verses reflect a sense of the psychological interior where meanings are made and unmade: “internal difference, where the meanings are.”

FORMS OF REALISM AND NATURALISM

The two great literary movements of the late nineteenth century were realism and naturalism. The term realism refers to a movement in English, European, and American literature that gathered force from the 1830s to the end of the century. As defined by William Dean Howells, the magazine editor who was for some decades the chief American advocate of realist aesthetics as well as the author of over thirty novels, including The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” But truthful treatment of material depends on the material in question; Henry James spoke of the documentary value of Howells’s work, thereby calling attention to realism’s preoccupation with the observable surfaces of the world in which fictional characters lived, surfaces that made the world seem lifelike to readers. Characters in Howells’s novels were “representative,” that is, composites of the sort of people readers thought they already knew, people without fame or huge fortunes, without startling accomplishments or immense abilities.

By contrast, the realism practiced by Edith Wharton and Henry James focused on the interior moral and psychological lives of upper-class people, although always taking care in describing these people’s surroundings. Wharton and James hoped to convince readers—most of whom were from the middle class—that the inner lives of the privileged were in accord with the truths of human nature. Wealthy people had what working people did not—time to develop and display their inner selves; they were just like everybody else, although more so. In novels such as The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton depicts the intangibles of thwarted desire, self-betrayal, hostile emotion, and repressed voices. At times, her accounts of the struggles of individuals such as Lily Bart of The House of Mirth to survive in a seemingly pleasant but actually hostile society reflect an almost Darwinian view of upper-class life, a naturalistic vision of human struggle; this is not the pleasant world of Howells’s well-meaning characters, but it is no less “realistic.”

Realist writers believed in the power of language to represent reality in ways that were aesthetically satisfying and true to their sense of the world. But realism could never once and for all convey the real world through language; the world was always out there waiting for another writer to decide how to treat it. What they were trying to represent was always able to elude their desire to fix it in print; but that did not stop them from trying. Two of the most acclaimed artists of the era—Mark Twain and Henry James—understood that language was an interpretation of the real rather than the real thing itself. As a western writer, Twain worked within a tradition of vernacular tale-telling, which some later writers saw as the essence of a truly American style. Because this style was already an exaggeration, it could not truly be called “realistic” in the Howellsian sense; and Twain’s later work is infused with pessimism and social critique well beyond the realistic norm. James, beginning with recognizably realistic fiction, using a large cast of individualized, although usually upper-class characters described by an all-knowing narrator, as in The American (1876), developed increasingly subtle metaphorical and proto-modernistic representations of the flow of a character’s inner thought—the so-called “stream of consciousness”—as in The Golden Bowl (1904).

Naturalism can be thought of as a version of realism, or as an alternative to it. Literary naturalists, unlike the realists for whom human beings defined themselves within recognizable settings, wrote about human life as it was shaped by forces beyond human control. For them, their view was truly realistic, while Howellsian realism was a form of prettifying. Naturalism introduces characters from the fringes and depths of society, far from the middle class, whose lives really do spin out of control; their fates are seen to be the outcome of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and the bad luck that can often seem to control the lives of people without money or influence. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1870) theorized that human beings had developed over the ages from nonhuman forms of life, successfully adapting to changing environmental conditions. Darwin was not interested in the social world, but in the 1870s, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer applied Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the “survival of the fittest” to human groups. This idea was enthusiastically welcomed by many leading American businessmen. Andrew Carnegie, for example, argued that unrestrained competition was the equivalent of a law of nature designed to eliminate those unfit for the new economic order.

For the novelists, naturalism was thought to make their work scientific—thus truly realistic—rather than romantic. Émile Zola (1840–1902), the influential French theorist and novelist, wrote in his influential essay “The Experimental Novel” (1880):

We must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies. Determinism governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental reasoning that combats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists and will replace novels of pure imagination by novels of observation and experiment.

A number of American writers adopted aspects of Zola’s form of naturalism, though each brought naturalism into his or her work in different ways, to different degrees, and combined with other perspectives. At some level they all understood that they were fabulists, not scientists, and ultimately none of them was willing to sacrifice some idea of human life as meaningful. Even the statement that life has no meaning is, after all, a meaningful statement; there is no escape from this paradox. Naturalists wanted to explore how biology, environment, and other material forces shaped lives—particularly the lives of lower-class people, who supposedly had less control over their lives than those who were better off. In this respect, naturalism is an intervention that strives to make lower-class lives comprehensible to the middle-class readers who comprised the main audience for fiction. Thus, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Frank Norris all allowed in different degrees for the value of human beings, for their potential to make some measure of sense out of their experience, and for their capacity to act compassionately—even altruistically—under the most adverse circumstances. Even though, therefore, they were challenging conventional wisdom about human motivation and causality in the natural world, the bleakness and pessimism sometimes found in their fiction are not the same as despair and cynicism. Careful reading of such Ambrose Bierce stories as “Chicamauga” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” reveals his awareness of fiction as a tool to explore inner truths.

Stephen Crane, too, did not believe that environment counts for everything, though he said of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) that it does count for a great deal in determining human fate. Not every person born in a slum becomes a criminal, drunkard, or suicide; and Crane clearly depicts Maggie’s final action in the novella as her considered choice. In “The Blue Hotel” the earth is described in one of the most famous passages in naturalistic fiction as a “whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb.” But questions of responsibility and agency are still alive at the end of the story. In Crane’s Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, the main character Henry Fleming responds throughout to the world of chaos and violence that surrounds him with alternating surges of panic and self-congratulations, not as a man who has fully understood himself and his place in the world. And yet, Henry has learned something; Crane, like most naturalists, is more ambiguous, more accepting of paradoxes, than a simplified notion of naturalism would suggest.

Biology, environment, psychological drives, and chance play a large part in shaping human ends in Crane’s fiction. But these thematic matters are inflected by his distinct literary style, which merges honest reportage with impressionistic literary techniques to present incomplete characters and a broken world—a world more random than scientifically predictable. We are also left, however, with the hardly pessimistic implications of “The Open Boat”: that precisely because human beings are exposed to a savage world of chance where death is always imminent, they would do well to learn the art of sympathetic identification with others and how to practice solidarity, an art often learned at the price of death. After all, a belief in the meaning of deeply felt human connection is Crane’s final sense of reality in this story.

Theodore Dreiser did not share Crane’s tendency to use words and images as if he were a composer or painter. Like Crane, he tended to see men and women as victims of their destinies rather than creators of their lives. But his significance for readers lies in his cumulative technique that represents the solidity of the world in which his characters are entrapped. If Crane gave American readers a new sense of human consciousness under conditions of extreme pressure, Dreiser gave them in novels such as Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911) a sense of the fumbling, yearning, confused response to the simultaneously enchanting, exciting, ugly, and dangerous metropolis that had become home to such large numbers of Americans by the turn of the century. Like Dreiser, Abraham Cahan wrote about city dwellers, in particular about eastern European Jews who, starting in 1882, had been coming to the United States in large numbers. Many of these Yiddish-speaking immigrants settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Cahan’s major novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) explores the tensions entailed in attempts to reconcile traditional values and ways of living with American modernity in an urban work that, in the manner of literary naturalists, puts into conflict individual agency with larger social and natural forces, while providing new perspectives on ethnicity. Cahan’s stories also explore themes of immigrant assimilation.

In Jack London’s most successful works, such as his novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904), along with most of his nearly two hundred short stories, there are currents of myth and romance. London was notoriously inconsistent—a socialist and an individualist, a believer in Anglo-Saxon superiority who attacked white racism and colonialism. Most of his short story “The Law of Life” (1901) recounts Old Koshkoosh’s memories, especially his youthful encounter with a dying moose set upon by wolves. Koshkoosh himself, an imagined recreation of an indigenous person, has been left to die by his tribe as is customary, London suggests, when people reach extreme old age. He thinks: “Nature did not care. To life she set one task, gave one law. To perpetuate was the task of life, its law is death.” This thought suggests a deterministic view of life, but what London underscores in the overall story is that acts of imagination and identification lend meaning and dignity to human existence.

In sum, despite conventional notions that insisted on humanity’s elevated place in the universe and a middle-class readership that disliked ugliness and “immorality,” urban America and the sparsely populated hinterlands proved to be fertile ground for realistic literary techniques and naturalistic ideas, though the ideas were often inconsistently applied and the documentary techniques usually interwoven with other literary strategies. Crucial to American writing during this period, realism and naturalism took on many forms and exposed readers to a wide range of subjects and perspectives.

REGIONAL WRITING

Regional writing, another expression of the realist impulse, resulted from the desire both to preserve a record of distinctive ways of life and to come to terms with the new world that seemed to be replacing these early and allegedly happier times. More practically, regional writing responded to the new market of mass magazines, for which the short story form was ideal, and for which variations of local habits could provide an endless source of narrative. By the end of the nineteenth century, virtually every region of the country had one or more “local colorists” dedicated to capturing its natural, social, and linguistic features. Though often suffused with nostalgia, the best work of the regionalists renders convincing details of a particular time and investigates psychological character traits from a broad perspective. Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” which made Harte a national celebrity in 1868, is sometimes treated as an example of local color, but it is more concerned with creating myths of the colorful West than it is in realism. Like other literary forms, it is a hybrid rather than a pure example of a strategy rigorously applied. Writers as diverse as Owen Wister, author of the popular novel The Virginian (1902), Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Austin, and Jack London all contributed to the work of depicting the West as a legendary region—or (as in the case of Twain and Bierce) to the work of debunking such a legend.

Hamlin Garland, rather than creating a myth of a region, set out to destroy one. Like many writers of the time, Garland was encouraged by Howells to write about what he knew best—in his case the farmers of the upper Midwest. As he later said, his purpose in his early stories was to show that the “mystic quality connected with free land . . . was a myth.” Garland’s farmers are not the vigorous and thoughtful yeomen of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), but bent, drab figures. In Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw,” from the collection Main-Travelled Roads (1891), local color is not nostalgia but realism in the service of social protest—another indication that realism could never be only “realistic” but was always something more.

The places and the themes of regional writers assumed increasing importance in the twentieth century. Many women initially associated with regionalism expanded their interests to write about the world of women: Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sui Sin Far, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Winnemucca, and others. Mary Austin was a self-declared feminist, and much of her writing, including her classic Land of Little Rain (1903), invites readers to see the world from a woman’s perspective. But more important, in “The Land of Little Rain” and other sketches, she introduced the desert country of southern California to readers and showed how the characters who live in this inhospitable terrain are products of it. Stowe, Jewett, and Freeman do more than lament the postwar economic and spiritual decline of New England; their female characters suggest the capacity of human beings to live independently and with dignity in the face of community pressures, patriarchal power, and material deprivation.

Kate Chopin may be thought of as a regional writer interested in the customs, language, and landscapes of the northern Louisiana countryside and, downriver, New Orleans. But in addition to working with local color, Chopin wrote probing psychological fiction with intriguing female protagonists. Edna Pontellier of The Awakening (1899) looks back to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and forward to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Chopin began her writing career only after she returned to her native St. Louis from a long sojourn in Louisiana, and in her narratives she memorializes (and perhaps romanticizes) the relaxed and sensuous way of life of the local population. Though the lives she portrays seem less severe and repressed than those in the Protestant towns and villages of New England regionalism, Chopin nonetheless depicts—especially in The Awakening—the struggles of women in conservative Catholic communities. With its focus on the inner life of Edna Pontellier, The Awakening in particular, a novel that has served to crystallize many women’s issues at the turn of the century and since, testifies to the fact that regionalism, despite its avowed focus on lives outside of the urban mainstream, is by no means a marginal genre.

From a very different perspective, Native Americans also described their lives and traditions—especially as these were imperiled by white advances into their territories. The oratory of Charlot and Smohalla, the Ghost Dance religion, and the writings of Zitkala Ša, Sarah Winnemucca, and Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) all widened public appreciation of literary models outside the European tradition while also challenging the dominant culture’s identification of the West with the imaginary line of the frontier.

REALISM AS ARGUMENT

Realism was an important spur to the development of nonfiction. Between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I, much nonfiction prose described, analyzed, and critiqued the social, economic, and political institutions that had emerged in this period of rapid growth and change. Women’s rights, political corruption, the degradation of the natural world, economic inequity, business deceptions, the exploitation of labor, tenement housing—these became the subjects of articles and books by numerous journalists, historians, social critics, photographers, and economists. Much of this writing had literary ambition and is regarded as among the great literary achievements of the era. For example, in his autobiographical work of moral instruction and philosophy, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), Henry Adams registers through a literary sensibility a historian’s sense of the disorientation that accompanies rapid and continuous change.

Of all the issues of the day, perhaps the most persistent and resistant to solution was the fact of racial inequality in the social arena. Several selections in this anthology address the long history of white injustices to black Americans, particularly as it became clear, with the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from the southern states in 1877, and then with the subsequent shift to segregationist Jim Crow laws and the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), that there had been considerable erosion of the Constitutional amendments promising to guarantee the civil rights of African Americans. Among the most significant and influential voices of the period were those of African Americans addressing such topics as race, black community, and continuing racial inequities. In their short fiction and novels, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson investigated the very nature of “race,” pointing to its contradictions and (especially in the case of Hopkins) its promises for the regeneration of black community. Two works by black writers and leaders from the turn of the century have a special claim on our attention: the widely admired autobiography of Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1900), and the richly imagined The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by W. E. B. Du Bois, with its powerfully argued rejection of Washington’s assimilationist philosophy. The Washington–Du Bois controversy set some of the key terms of the continuing debate among black leaders about which strategies would most effectively hasten educational, social, economic, and political equality for blacks in the United States. It is fair to say that in very different ways Up from Slavery and The Souls of Black Folk—admirable literary achievements in themselves—carried forward the antebellum traditions of such writers as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs and set some of the terms of the cultural debates that would become central to the Harlem Renaissance.

In the half century we have been considering, material, intellectual, social, and psychological changes in the lives of many Americans went forward at such extreme speed and on such a massive scale that the enormously diverse writing of the time registers, at its core, degrees of shocked recognition of the human consequences of these radical transformations. Sometimes the shock is expressed in recoil and denial—thus the persistence, in the face of the ostensible triumph of realism, of the literature of diversion: nostalgic poetry, sentimental and melodramatic drama, and popular swashbuckling historical novels such as Charles Major’s best-selling When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898). The more enduring writings of the period, however, attempt to come to terms imaginatively with the individual and collective dislocations associated with the closing of the frontier, urbanization, unprecedented immigration, the surge of national wealth unequally distributed, revised conceptions of human nature and destiny, racial inequality and the concept of race, the reordering of family and civil life, and the pervasive spread of mechanical and organizational technologies. Although change is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked, “the law of life,” in the half century after the Civil War, writers seemed more aware of turbulence and disruption than before, and attempted to generate new forms of literary art that could represent and make sense of a nation in flux.