American Literature: History of American Literature - Chapter 5: The Rise of Realism: 1860

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835–1910)

Frontier Humor and Realism

Local Colorists

Midwestern Realism

Cosmopolitan Novelists

Naturalism and Muckraking

The “Chicago School” of Poetry

Two Women Regional Novelists

The Rise of Black American Literature

The U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) between the industrial North and the agricultural, slaveowning

South was a watershed in American history. The innocent optimism of the young

democratic nation gave way, after the war, to a period of exhaustion. American idealism remained

but was rechanneled. Before the war, idealists championed human rights, especially the abolition

of slavery; after the war, Americans increasingly idealized progress and the self-made man. This

was the era of the millionaire manufacturer and the speculator, when Darwinian evolution and the

“survival of the fittest” seemed to sanction the sometimes unethical methods of the successful

business tycoons.

Business boomed after the war. War production had boosted industry in the North and given it

prestige and political clout. It also gave industrial leaders valuable experience in the management

of men and machines. The enormous natural resources of the American land—iron, coal, oil, gold,

and silver—benefitted business. The new intercontinental rail system, inaugurated in 1869, and

the transcontinental telegraph, which began operating in 1861, gave industry access to materials,

markets, and communications. The constant influx of immigrants provided a seemingly endless

supply of inexpensive labor as well. Over 23 million foreigners—German, Scandinavian, and Irish

in the early years, and increasingly Central and Southern Europeans thereafter—flowed into the

United States between 1860 and 1910. On the west coast, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino contract

laborers were imported by Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies, and other American

business interests.

In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in small villages, but by 1919, half of the population

was concentrated in about twelve cities. Problems of urbanization and industrialization appeared:

poor and overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions, low pay (called “wage slavery”), difficult

working conditions, and inadequate restraints on business. Labor unions grew, and strikes brought

the plight of working people to national awareness. Farmers, too, saw themselves struggling

against the money interests of the east, the so-called “robber barons” like J.P. Morgan and John D.

Rockefeller. Their eastern banks tightly controlled mortgages and credit so vital to western

development and agriculture, while railroad companies charged high prices to transport farm

products to the cities. The farmer gradually became an object of ridicule, lampooned as an

unsophisticated “hick” or “rube.”

The ideal American of the post–Civil War period became the

millionaire. In 1860, there were fewer than 100 millionaires; by 1875, there were more than 1,000.

From 1860 to 1914, the United States was transformed from a small, young, agricultural excolony

to a huge, modern, industrial nation. A debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the

world’s wealthiest state, with a population that had more than doubled, rising from 31 million in

1860 to 76 million in 1900. By World War I, the United States had become a major world power.

As industrialization grew, so did alienation. Characteristic American novels of the period—

Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Jack London’s Martin Eden, and later Theodore

Dreiser’s An American Tragedy—depict the damage of economic forces and alienation on the weak

or vulnerable individual. Survivors—like Twain’s Huck Finn, Humphrey Vanderveyden in London’s

The Sea-Wolf, and Dreiser’s opportunistic Sister Carrie—endure through inner strength involving

kindness, flexibility, and individuality above all.

SAMUEL CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN) (1835–1910)

Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi

River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway’s famous statement that all

of American literature comes from one great book—Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—

indicates this author’s towering place in the tradition. Early 19th-century American writers tended

to be too flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious, partially because they were still trying to prove that

they could write as elegantly as the English. Twain’s style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial

American speech, gave U.S. writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first

major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous

slang and iconoclasm.

For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a

literary technique. It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Thus, it was

profoundly liberating and potentially at odds with society. The most well-known example is Huck

Finn, a poor boy who decides to follow the voice of his conscience and help a slave escape to freedom,

even though Huck thinks that doing this means that he will be damned to hell for breaking the law.

Twain’s masterpiece, which appeared in 1884, is set in the Mississippi River village of St.

Petersburg. The son of an alcoholic bum, Huck has

just been adopted by a respectable family when his

father, in a drunken stupor, threatens to kill him.

Fearing for his life, Huck escapes, feigning his own

death. He is joined in his escape by another outcast,

the slave Jim, whose owner, Miss Watson, is

thinking of selling him down the river to the

harsher slavery of the deep south. Huck and Jim

float on a raft down the majestic Mississippi, but

are sunk by a steamboat, separated, and later

reunited. They go through many comical and

dangerous shore adventures that show the variety,

generosity, and sometimes cruel irrationality of

society. In the end, it is discovered that Miss

Watson had already freed Jim, and a respectable

family is taking care of the wild boy Huck. However,

Huck grows impatient with civilized society and

plans to escape to “the territories”—Native

American lands. The ending gives the reader the

counter-version of the classic American success

myth: the open road leading to the pristine

wilderness, away from the morally corrupting

influences of “civilization.”
James Fenimore

Cooper’s novels, Walt Whitman’s hymns to the open

road, William Faulkner’s The Bear, and Jack

Kerouac’s On the Road are other literary examples.

Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a story of

death, rebirth, and initiation. The escaped slave, Jim, becomes a father figure for Huck;

furthermore, in deciding to save Jim, Huck grows morally beyond the bounds of his slave-owning

society. It is Jim’s adventures that initiate Huck into the complexities of human nature and give

him moral courage.

Samuel Clemens, aka. Mark Twain

The novel also dramatizes Twain’s ideal of the harmonious community: “What you want, above

all things, on a raft is for everybody to be satisfied and feel right and kind toward the others.” Like

Melville’s ship the Pequod, the raft sinks and with it that special community. The pure, simple

world of the raft is ultimately overwhelmed by progress—the steamboat—but the mythic image of

the river remains, as vast and changing as life itself.

The unstable relationship between reality and illusion is Twain’s characteristic theme, the basis

of much of his humor. The magnificent yet deceptive, constantly-changing river is also the main

feature of his imaginative landscape. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recalls his training as a young

steamboat pilot when he writes: “I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the

eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief.”

Twain’s moral sense as a writer echoes his pilot’s responsibility to steer the ship to safety.

Samuel Clemens’s pen name, “Mark Twain,” is the phrase Mississippi boatmen used to signify two

fathoms (3.6 meters) of water, the depth needed for a boat’s safe passage. Twain’s serious purpose,

combined with a rare genius for humor and style, keep his writing fresh and appealing.

1. Compare the mood of the nation from before the Civil War to after it. How did it change?

2. What was the effect of the war on industry in America?

3. J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were examples of men known as

a. business magnates.

b. robber barons.

c. sharecroppers.

d. carpetbaggers.

4. Explain the nation’s overall economic and social position in the early 1900s. Address such

issues as farming, finances, and the effects of industrialization.

5. Literature of the early 1900s was characterized by a theme of post-industrialization

a. alienation.

b. satisfaction.

c. prejudice.

d. socialism.

6. How does the author compare Mark Twain’s writing to all of that which had come out of

America before him? In what ways was Twain’s writing unique?

7. Explain what you think the river must have symbolized in The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn. Can this interpretation carry over into everyday life? How?

FRONTIER HUMOR AND REALISM

Two major literary currents in 19th-century America merged in Mark Twain: popular

frontier humor and local color, or “regionalism.” These related literary approaches began

in the 1830s and had even earlier roots in local oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages, on

riverboats, in mining camps, and around cowboy campfires far from city amusements, storytelling

flourished. Exaggeration, tall tales, incredible boasts, and comic workingmen heroes enlivened

frontier literature. These humorous forms were found in many frontier regions—in the “old

Southwest” (the present-day inland south and the lower midwest), the mining frontier, and the

Pacific coast. Each region had its colorful characters around whom stories collected: Mike Fink, the

Mississippi riverboat brawler; Casey Jones, the brave railroad engineer; John Henry, the steeldriving

African-American; Paul Bunyan, the giant logger whose fame was helped along by

advertising; westerners Kit Carson, the Native American fighter, and Davy Crockett, the scout.

Their exploits were exaggerated and enhanced in ballads, newspapers, and magazines. Sometimes,

as with Kit Carson and Davy Crockett, these stories were strung together into book form.

Twain, Faulkner, and many other writers, particularly southerners, are indebted to pre–Civil

War frontier humorists such as Johnson Hooper, George Washington Harris, Augustus Longstreet,

Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and Joseph Baldwin. From them and the American frontier folk came the

wild proliferation of comical new American words: “absquatulate” (leave), “flabbergasted” (amazed),

“rampagious” (unruly, rampaging). Local boasters, or “ring-tailed roarers,” who asserted they were

half horse, half alligator, also underscored the boundless energy of the frontier. They drew strength

from natural hazards that would terrify lesser men. “I’m a regular tornado,” one swelled, “tough as

hickory and long-winded as a nor’wester. I can strike a blow like a falling tree, and every lick makes

a gap in the crowd that lets in an acre of sunshine.”

1. Which type of literary current did tall tales exemplify?

a. realism

b. fantasy

c. colloquialism

d. frontier humor

2. Which of the following best describes the literary nature of the line below?

“I’m a regular tornado.”

a. irony

b. metaphor

c. personification

d. simile

LOCAL COLORISTS

Like frontier humor, local color writing has old roots, but produced its best works long after

the Civil War. Obviously, many pre-war writers, from Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel

Hawthorne to John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, paint striking portraits of

specific American regions. What sets the colorists apart is their self-conscious and exclusive interest

in rendering a given location and their scrupulously factual, realistic technique.

Bret Harte (1836–1902) is remembered as the

author of adventurous stories such as “The Luck of

Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” set

along the western mining frontier. As the first great

success in the local colorist school, Harte for a brief

time was perhaps the best-known writer in America—

such was the appeal of his romantic version of the

gunslinging west. Outwardly realistic, he was one of

the first to introduce low-life characters—cunning

gamblers, gaudy prostitutes, and uncouth robbers—

into serious literary works. He got away with this (as

had Charles Dickens in England, who greatly admired

Harte’s work) by showing in the end that these

seeming derelicts really had hearts of gold.

Several women writers are remembered for their

fine depictions of New England: Mary Wilkins

Freeman (1852–1930), Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811–1896), and especially Sarah Orne Jewett

(1849–1909). Jewett’s originality, exact observation of

her Maine characters and setting, and sensitive style

are best seen in her fine story

“The White Heron” from A

White Heron & Other

Stories (1886) and in

Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s local

color works, especially The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), depicting

humble Maine fishing communities, greatly influenced Jewett.

Nineteenth-century women writers formed their own networks

of moral support and influence, as their letters show. Women

made up the major audience for fiction, and many women wrote

popular novels, poems, and humorous pieces.

All regions of the country celebrated themselves in writing

influenced by local color. Some of it included social protest,

especially toward the end of the century, when social inequality

and economic hardship were particularly pressing issues. Racial

injustice and inequality between the sexes appear in the works of

southern writers such as George Washington Cable (1844–1925)

and Kate Chopin (1851–1904), whose powerful novels set in

Cajun/French Louisiana transcend the local color label. Cable’s

The Grandissimes (1880) treats racial injustice with great

artistry; like Kate Chopin’s daring novel The Awakening (1899), about a woman’s doomed attempt

to find her own identity through passion, it was ahead of its time. In The Awakening, a young

Bret Harte

Sarah Orne Jewett

married woman with attractive children and an indulgent and successful husband gives up family,

money, respectability, and eventually her life in search of self-realization. Poetic evocations of the

ocean, birds (caged and free), and music endow this short novel with unusual intensity and

complexity.

Often paired with The Awakening is the fine story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) by Charlotte

Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Both works were forgotten for a time, but rediscovered by feminist

literary critics late in the 20th century. In Gilman’s story, a condescending doctor drives his wife

mad by confining her in a room to “cure” her of nervous exhaustion. The imprisoned wife projects

her entrapment onto the wallpaper, in the design of which she sees imprisoned women creeping

behind bars.

1. Describe the style of work from writers known as colorists.

2. Colorist writer Bret Harte was best known for his

a. low-life characters.

b. realistic plots.

c. simple prose.

d. unnaturally beautiful settings.

3. List three female colorist authors and name the title of a work by each one.

MIDWESTERN REALISM

For many years, the editor of the important Atlantic

Monthly magazine, William Dean Howells

(1837–1920), published realistic local color writing by Bret

Harte, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and others. He

was the champion of realism, and his novels, such as A Modern

Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard

of New Fortunes (1890), carefully interweave social

circumstances with the emotions of ordinary middle-class

Americans.

Love, ambition, idealism, and temptation motivate his

characters; Howells was acutely aware of the moral corruption

of business tycoons during the Gilded Age of the 1870s.

Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham uses an ironic title to make

this point. Silas Lapham became rich by cheating an old

business partner; his immoral act deeply disturbed his family,

though for years Lapham could not see that he had acted

improperly. In the end, Lapham is morally redeemed, choosing

bankruptcy rather than unethical success. Silas Lapham is, like

Huckleberry Finn, an unsuccess story: Lapham’s business fall is

his moral rise. Toward the end of his life, Howells, like Twain,

became increasingly active in political causes, defending the

rights of labor union organizers and deploring American

colonialism in the Philippines.

COSMOPOLITAN NOVELISTS

Henry James (1843–1916)

Henry James once wrote that art, especially

literary art, “makes life, makes interest, makes

importance.” James’s fiction and criticism is the most

highly conscious, sophisticated, and difficult of its era.

With Twain, James is generally ranked as the greatest

American novelist of the second half of the 19th century.

James is noted for his “international theme,” that is,

the complex relationships between naive Americans and

cosmopolitan Europeans. What his biographer Leon Edel

calls James’s first, or “international,” phase encompassed

such works as Transatlantic Sketches (travel pieces, 1875),

The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and a

masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In The

American, for example, Christopher Newman, a naive but

intelligent and idealistic self-made millionaire

industrialist, goes to Europe seeking a bride. When her

family rejects him because he lacks an aristocratic

background, he has a chance to revenge himself; in

deciding not to, he demonstrates his moral superiority.

Page from book by William

Dean Howells

Henry James

James’s second period was experimental. He exploited new subject matters—feminism and

social reform in The Bostonians (1886) and political intrigue in The Princess Casamassima (1885).

He also attempted to write for the theater, but failed embarrassingly when his play Guy Domville

(1895) was booed on the first night.

In his third (“major”) phase, James returned to international subjects, but treated them with

increasing sophistication and psychological penetration. The complex and almost mythical The

Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) (which James felt was his best novel), and The

Golden Bowl (1904) date from this major period. If the main theme of Twain’s work is appearance

and reality, James’s constant concern is perception. In James, only self-awareness and clear

perception of others yields wisdom and self-sacrificing love. As James develops, his novels become

more psychological and less concerned with external events.

In James’s later works, the most important events are all psychological—usually moments of

intense illumination that show characters their previous blindness. For example, in The

Ambassadors, the idealistic, aging Lambert Strether uncovers a secret love affair and, in doing so,

discovers a new complexity to his inner life. His rigid, upright morality is humanized and enlarged

as he discovers a capacity to accept those who have sinned.

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)

Like James, Edith Wharton grew up partly in Europe and eventually

made her home there. She was descended from a wealthy, established

family in New York society and saw firsthand the decline of this

cultivated group and, in her view, the rise of boorish, nouveau-riche

business families. This social transformation is the background of

many of her novels.

Like James, Wharton contrasts Americans and Europeans. The

core of her concern is the gulf separating social reality and the

inner self. Often a sensitive character feels trapped by unfeeling

characters or social forces. Edith Wharton had personally

experienced such entrapment as a young writer suffering a long

nervous breakdown partly due to the conflict in roles between writer

and wife.

Wharton’s best novels include The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom

of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), The Age of Innocence (1920), and

the beautifully crafted novella Ethan Frome (1911).

Edith Wharton

1. What is ironic about the title of William Dean Howells’s work, The Rise of Silas Lapham?

2. How is Henry James’s The American an example of his use of “international theme” in his

work?

3. Henry James’s writing can be classified into three periods. Describe the writing that came

out of his third period. How was it different than that of his first?

4. The term that describes a class of people who have recently come into a large amount of

money is

a. aristocracy.

b. bourgeoisie.

c. nouveau-riche.

d. muckraker.

5. Edith Wharton’s work was characterized by her concern over the vast separation between

social realities and inner satisfaction. Give an example of this type of inner conflict.

NATURALISM AND MUCKRAKING

Wharton’s and James’s dissections of hidden sexual and financial motivations at work in

society link them with writers who seem superficially quite different: Stephen Crane,

Jack London, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Like the cosmopolitan novelists,

but much more explicitly, these naturalists used realism to relate the individual to society. Often,

they exposed social problems and were influenced by Darwinian thought and the related

philosophical doctrine of determinism, which views individuals as the helpless pawns of economic

and social forces beyond their control.

Naturalism is essentially a literary expression of determinism. Associated with bleak, realistic

depictions of lower-class life, determinism denies religion as a motivating force in the world and

instead perceives the universe as a machine. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers had also

imagined the world as a machine, but as a perfect one, invented by God and tending toward

progress and human betterment. Naturalists imagined society as a blind machine, godless and out

of control.

The 19th-century American historian Henry Adams constructed an elaborate theory of history

involving the idea of the dynamo, or machine force, and entropy, or decay of force. Instead of

progress, Adams sees inevitable decline in human society.

Stephen Crane, the son of a clergyman, put the loss of God most succinctly:

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

Like Romanticism, naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is usually traced to the works of

Honoré de Balzac in the 1840s and seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave

Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Emile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. It daringly opened up

the seamy underside of society and such topics as divorce, sex, adultery, poverty, and crime.

Naturalism flourished as Americans became urbanized

and aware of the importance of large economic and social

forces. By 1890, the frontier was declared officially closed.

Most Americans resided in towns, and business dominated

even remote farmsteads.

Stephen Crane (1871–1900)

Stephen Crane, born in New Jersey, had roots going back

to Revolutionary War soldiers, clergymen, sheriffs, judges,

and farmers who had lived a century earlier. Primarily a

journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays,

Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His

short stories—in particular, “The Open Boat,” “The Blue

Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”—exemplified

that literary form. His haunting Civil War novel, The Red

Badge of Courage, was published to great acclaim in 1895,

Stephen Crane

but he barely had time to bask in the attention before he died, at the age of twenty-nine, having

neglected his health. He was virtually forgotten during the first two decades of the twentieth

century, but was resurrected through a laudatory biography by Thomas Beer in 1923. He has

enjoyed continued success ever since—as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a

symbolist.

Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic

American novels. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose uneducated,

alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love and eager to escape her violent home life, she allows

herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous

mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but soon commits suicide out of despair.

Crane’s earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark

Maggie as a naturalist work.

Jack London (1876–1916)

A poor, self-taught worker from California, the

naturalist Jack London was catapulted from poverty to

fame by his first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf

(1900), set largely in the Klondike region of Alaska and

the Canadian Yukon. Others of his bestsellers, including

The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904),

made him the highest-paid writer in the United States of

his time.

The autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909)

depicts the inner stresses of the American dream as

London had experienced them during his meteoric rise

from obscure poverty to wealth and fame. Eden, an

impoverished but intelligent and hardworking sailor and

laborer, is determined to become a writer. Eventually, his

writing makes him rich and well known, but Eden

realizes that the woman he loves cares only for his

money and fame. His despair over her inability to love

causes him to lose faith in human nature. He also suffers

from class alienation, for he no longer belongs to the

working class, while he rejects the materialistic values of the wealthy whom he worked so hard to

join. He sails for the South Pacific and commits suicide by jumping into the sea. Like many of the

best novels of its time, Martin Eden is an unsuccess story. It looks ahead to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The

Great Gatsby in its revelation of despair amid great wealth.

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)

The 1925 work An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, like London’s Martin Eden, explores

the dangers of the American dream. The novel relates, in great detail, the life of Clyde Griffiths, a

boy of weak will and little self-awareness. He grows up in great poverty in a family of wandering

evangelists, but dreams of wealth and the love of beautiful women. A rich uncle employs him in his

factory. When his girlfriend, Roberta, becomes pregnant, she demands that he marry her.

Meanwhile, Clyde has fallen in love with a wealthy society girl who represents success, money, and

social acceptance. Clyde carefully plans to drown Roberta on a boat trip, but at the last minute he

Jack London

begins to change his mind; however, she

accidentally falls out of the boat. Clyde, a good

swimmer, does not save her, and she drowns. As

Clyde is brought to justice, Dreiser replays his

story in reverse, masterfully using the vantage

points of prosecuting and defense attorneys to

analyze each step and motive that led the mildmannered

Clyde, with a highly religious

background and good family connections, to

commit murder.

Despite his awkward style, Dreiser displays

crushing authority in An American Tragedy. Its

precise details build up an overwhelming sense

of tragic inevitability. The novel is a scathing

portrait of the American success myth gone sour,

but it is also a universal story about the stresses of urbanization, modernization, and alienation.

Within it roam the romantic and dangerous fantasies of the dispossessed.

An American Tragedy is a reflection of the dissatisfaction, envy, and despair that afflicted many

poor and working people in America’s competitive, success-driven society. As American industrial

power soared, the glittering lives of the wealthy in newspapers and photographs sharply contrasted

with the drab lives of ordinary farmers and city workers. The media fanned rising expectations and

unreasonable desires. Such problems, common to modernizing nations, gave rise to muckraking

journalism—penetrating investigative reporting that documented social problems and provided an

important impetus to social reform.

The great tradition of American investigative journalism had its beginning in this period,

during which national magazines such as McClure’s and Collier’s published Ida M. Tarbell’s History

of the Standard Oil Company (1904), Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904), and other

hard-hitting exposés. Muckraking novels used eye-catching journalistic techniques to depict harsh

working conditions and oppression. Populist Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) exposed big

railroad companies, while socialist Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

(1906) painted the squalor of the Chicago meatpacking houses.

Jack London’s dystopia, The Iron Heel (1908), anticipates George

Orwell’s 1984 in predicting a class war and the takeover of the

government.

Another more artistic response was the realistic portrait, or

group of portraits, of ordinary characters and their frustrated

inner lives. The collection of stories—Main-Travelled Roads

(1891) by William Dean Howells’s protégé, Hamlin Garland

(1860–1940)—is a portrait gallery of ordinary people. It

shockingly depicted the poverty of midwestern farmers who were

demanding agricultural reforms. The title suggests the many

trails westward that the hardy pioneers followed and the dusty

main streets of the villages they settled.

Close to Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads is Winesburg, Ohio,

by Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), begun in 1916. This is a

Sherwood Anderson

Theodore Dreiser

loose collection of stories about residents of the fictitious town of Winesburg, seen through the eyes

of a naive young newspaper reporter, George Willard, who eventually leaves to seek his fortune in

the city. Like Main-Travelled Roads and other naturalistic works of the period, Winesburg, Ohio

emphasizes the quiet poverty, loneliness, and despair in small-town America.

1. Compare and contrast the overall philosophy of Enlightenment writers with that of

naturalist writers.

2. Summarize the main theme of Stephen Crane’s works. Why were they considered naturalist

in style?

3. The highest-paid writer in America in the early 1900s was

a. Jack London.

b. James Cooper.

c. Stephen Crane.

d. Edith Wharton.

4. In what way was London’s Martin Eden an autobiographical work?

5. Explain Dreiser’s work, An American Tragedy, in terms of its function as a manifestation of

the effects of stressful times.

6. Choose the phrase that most accurately describes the term, “muckraker.”

a. one who obeys the law

b. one who publicly unveils controversial issues

c. one who hides the truth

d. one who embellishes facts for entertainment purposes

7. How was Upton Sinclair’s work, The Jungle, an example of a muckraking story?

THE “CHICAGO SCHOOL” OF POETRY

Three Midwestern poets who grew up in Illinois and shared the midwestern concern with

ordinary people are Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters. Their poetry

often concerns obscure individuals; they developed techniques—like realism and dramatic

renderings—that reached out to a larger readership. They are part of the Midwestern, or Chicago,

School that arose before World War I to challenge the east coast literary establishment. The

“Chicago Renaissance” was a watershed in American culture: It demonstrated that America’s

interior had matured.

Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950)

By the turn of the century, Chicago had become a great city, home of

innovative architecture and cosmopolitan art collections. Chicago was

also the home of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, the most important literary

magazine of the day.

Among the intriguing contemporary poets the journal printed

was Edgar Lee Masters, author of the daring Spoon River Anthology

(1915), with its new “unpoetic” colloquial style, frank presentation of

sex, critical view of village life, and intensely-imagined inner lives of

ordinary people.

Spoon River Anthology is a collection of portraits presented as

colloquial epitaphs (words found inscribed on gravestones) summing

up the lives of individual villagers as if in their own words. It

presents a panorama of a country village through its cemetery. Two

hundred fifty people who are buried there speak, revealing their

deepest secrets. Many of the people are related; members of about twenty

families speak of their failures and dreams in free-verse monologues

that are surprisingly modern.

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)

A friend once said, “Trying to write briefly about Carl Sandburg is like trying to picture the

Grand Canyon in one black-and-white snapshot.” Poet, historian, biographer, novelist, musician,

essayist—Sandburg, son of a railroad blacksmith, was all of these and more. A journalist by

profession, he wrote a massive biography of Abraham Lincoln that is one of the classic works of the

twentieth century.

To many, Sandburg was a latter-day Walt Whitman, writing expansive, evocative urban and

patriotic poems and simple, childlike rhymes and ballads. He traveled about reciting and recording

his poetry in a lilting, mellifluously-toned voice that was a kind of singing. At heart he was totally

unassuming, notwithstanding his national fame. What he wanted from life, he once said, was “to

be out of jail . . . to eat regular . . . to get what I write printed, . . . a little love at home and a little

nice affection hither and yon over the American landscape, . . . (and) to sing every day.”

A fine example of his themes and his Whitmanesque style is the poem “Chicago” (1914):

Edgar Lee Masters

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the

Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders . . .

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)

Vachel Lindsay was a celebrant of small-town midwestern

populism and the creator of strong, rhythmic poetry designed to be

declaimed aloud. His work forms a curious link between the

popular, or folk, forms of poetry, such as Christian gospel songs and

vaudeville (popular theater) on the one hand and advanced

modernist poetics on the other. An extremely popular public reader

in his day, Lindsay’s readings prefigure “Beat” poetry readings of

the post–World War II era that were accompanied by jazz.

To popularize poetry, Lindsay developed what he called a

“higher vaudeville,” using music and strong rhythm. Racist by

today’s standards, his famous poem, “The Congo” (1914), celebrates

the history of Africans by mingling jazz, poetry, music, and

chanting. At the same time, he immortalized such figures on the

American landscape as Abraham Lincoln (“Abraham Lincoln Walks

at Midnight”) and John Chapman (“Johnny Appleseed”), often

blending facts with myth.

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)

Edwin Arlington Robinson is the best U.S. poet of the late

19th century. Like Edgar Lee Masters, he is known for short,

ironic character studies of ordinary individuals. Unlike Masters,

Robinson uses traditional metrics. Robinson’s imaginary Tilbury

Town, like Masters’s Spoon River, contains lives of quiet

desperation.

Some of the best known of Robinson’s dramatic monologues

are “Luke Havergal” (1896), about a forsaken lover; “Miniver

Cheevy” (1910), a portrait of a romantic dreamer; and “Richard

Cory” (1896), a somber portrait of a wealthy man who commits

suicide:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim,

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

Vachel Lindsay

Edwin Arlington Robinson

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

“Richard Cory” takes its place alongside Martin Eden, An American Tragedy, and The Great

Gatsby as a powerful warning against the overblown success myth that had come to plague

Americans in the era of the millionaire.

1. Explain the unique format and style of Edgar Lee Masters’s “Spoon River Anthology.”

2. Read the following sentence. Then, choose from below the word that is closest in meaning to

the word in bold-faced type.

He traveled about reciting and recording his poetry in a lilting, mellifluously-toned voice

that was a kind of singing.

a. awkwardly

b. discordantly

c. sweetly

d. rhythmically

3. Vachel Lindsay’s poetry was designed to be

a. acted out.

b. read aloud.

c. whispered.

d. translated into English.

4. Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem, “Richard Cory,” makes a statement to society. What is it?

TWO WOMEN REGIONAL NOVELISTS

Novelists Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) and Willa Cather

(1873–1947) explored women’s lives, placed in brilliantly

evoked regional settings. Neither novelist set out to address

specifically female issues; their early works usually treat male

protagonists, and only as they gained artistic confidence and maturity

did they turn to depictions of women’s lives. Glasgow and Cather can

only be regarded as “women writers” in a descriptive sense, for their

works resist categorization.

Glasgow was from Richmond, Virginia, the old capital of the

southern Confederacy. Her realistic novels examine the

transformation of the south from a rural to an industrial economy.

Mature works such as Virginia (1912) focus on the southern

experience, while later novels like Barren Ground (1925)—

acknowledged as her best—dramatize gifted women attempting to

surmount the claustrophobic, traditional southern code for women of

domesticity, piety, and dependence.

Cather, another Virginian, grew up on the Nebraska prairie among pioneering immigrants—

later immortalized in O Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia (1918), and her well-known story, “Neighbour

Rosicky” (1928). During her lifetime, she became increasingly alienated from the materialism of

modern life and wrote of alternative visions in the American Southwest and in the past. Death

Comes for the Archbishop (1927) evokes the idealism of two sixteenth-century priests establishing

the Catholic Church in the New Mexican desert. Cather’s works commemorate important aspects

of the American experience outside the literary mainstream—pioneering, the establishment of

religion, and women’s independent lives.

1. Willa Cather is best remembered for her

a. stories about men.

b. ability to express the traditional southern code for women.

c. similarities to other women writers.

d. portrayal of America.

2. Ellen Glasgow’s work was groundbreaking in the field of women’s literature. Why?

THE RISE OF BLACK AMERICAN LITERATURE

The literary achievement of African Americans was one of the most striking literary

developments of the post–Civil War era. In the writings of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.

Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and others,

the roots of black American writing took hold, notably in the forms of autobiography, protest

literature, sermons, poetry, and song.

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915)

Booker T. Washington, an educator and the most prominent black leader of his day, grew up as

a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, born to a white slaveholding father and a slave mother. His

fine, simple autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901), recounts his successful struggle to better

himself. He became renowned for his efforts to improve the lives of African Americans; his policy of

accommodation with whites—an attempt to involve the recently freed black American in the

mainstream of American society—was outlined in his famous Atlanta Exposition Address (1895).

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963)

Born in New England and educated at Harvard University and the University of Berlin

(Germany), W.E.B. Du Bois authored “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” an essay later

collected in his landmark book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois carefully demonstrates that

despite his many accomplishments, Washington had, in effect, accepted segregation—that is, the

unequal and separate treatment of black Americans—and that segregation would inevitably lead

to inferiority, particularly in education. Du Bois, a founder of the National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), also wrote sensitive appreciations of the African-

American traditions and culture; his work helped black intellectuals rediscover their rich folk

literature and music.

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)

Like Du Bois, the poet James Weldon Johnson

found inspiration in African-American spirituals.

His poem, “O Black and Unknown Bards,” (1917)

asks:

Heart of what slave poured out such melodyAs “Steal Away to Jesus”? On its strainsHis spirit must have nightly floated free,Though still about his hands he felt his chains.

Of mixed white and black ancestry, Johnson

explored the complex issue of race in his fictional

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), about

a mixed-race man who “passes” (is accepted) for

white. The book effectively conveys the black

American’s concern with issues of identity in

America.

Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932)

Charles Waddell Chesnutt—author of two collections of stories, The Conjure Woman (1899) and

The Wife of His Youth (1899); several novels, including The Marrow of Tradition (1901); and a

biography of Frederick Douglass—was ahead of his time. His stories dwell on racial themes, but

avoid predictable endings and generalized sentiment; his characters are distinct individuals with

complex attitudes about many things, including race. Chesnutt often shows the strength of the

black community and affirms ethical values and racial solidarity.

1. The thrust of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address was

a. aggressively fighting white society.b. involving the recently freed blacks in American society.c. gaining property-ownership rights for black Americans.d. a call for revolt among the black population.

2. The group known as the NAACP lobbied for

a. the promotion of the African-American agenda in public education.b. the advancement and protection of the rights of African Americans.c. scholarships for children of mixed marriages.d. equality between black men and women.

3. Who was the first black American author to write about racially-mixed ancestry?

a. Booker T. Washingtonb. Charles Waddell Chesnuttc. Langston Hughesd. James Weldon Johnson

4. Which of these literary forms came before the African-American literary tradition following

the Civil War?

a. autobiographyb. songsc. slave narrativesd. sermons

5. Is it possible, based on what you have read in this passage, that Du Bois was correct, that

Booker T. Washington had accepted segregation? Support your opinion.

American Literature

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

History of American Literature - Chapter 5: The Rise of Realism: 1860–1914

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