The first group of fiction writers to become popular—the local colourists—took over to some extent the task of portraying sectional groups that had been abandoned by writers of the new humour. Bret Harte, first of these writers to achieve wide success, admitted an indebtedness to prewar sectional humorists, as did some others; and all showed resemblances to the earlier group. Within a brief period, books by pioneers in the movement appeared: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks (1869) and Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories (1871), delightful vignettes of New England; Harte’s Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (1870), humorous and sentimental tales of California mining camp life; and Edward Eggleston’s Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), a novel of the early days of the settlement of Indiana. Down into the 20th century, short stories (and a relatively small number of novels) in patterns set by these three continued to appear. In time, practically every corner of the country had been portrayed in local-colour fiction. Additional writings were the depictions of Louisiana Creoles by George W. Cable, of Virginia blacks by Thomas Nelson Page, of Georgia blacks by Joel Chandler Harris, of Tennessee mountaineers by Mary Noailles Murfree (Charles Egbert Craddock), of tight-lipped folk of New England by Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, of people of New York City by Henry Cuyler Bunner and William Sydney Porter (“O. Henry”). The avowed aim of some of these writers was to portray realistically the lives of various sections and thus to promote understanding in a united nation. The stories as a rule were only partially realistic, however, since the authors tended nostalgically to revisit the past instead of portraying their own time, to winnow out less glamorous aspects of life, or to develop their stories with sentiment or humour. Touched by romance though they were, these fictional works were transitional to realism, for they did portray common folk sympathetically; they did concern themselves with dialect and mores; and some at least avoided older sentimental or romantic formulas.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was allied with literary comedians and local colourists. As a printer’s apprentice, he knew and emulated the prewar sectional humorists. He rose to prominence in days when Artemus Ward, Bret Harte, and their followers were idols of the public. His first books, The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), like several of later periods, were travel books in which affiliations with postwar professional humorists were clearest. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), his best works, which re-created the life of the Mississippi valley in the past, were closest to the work of older humorists and local colourists. Despite his flaws, he was one of America’s greatest writers. He was a very funny man. He had more skill than his teachers in selecting evocative details, and he had a genius for characterization.
Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnTitle page from the 1885 edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Project Gutenberg (Text 76)
Born and raised in Ohio, William Dean Howells was an effective advocate of a new realistic mode of fiction writing. At the start, Howells conceived of realism as a truthful portrayal of ordinary facets of life—with some limitations; he preferred comedy to tragedy, and he tended to be reticent to the point of prudishness. The formula was displayed at its best in Their Wedding Journey (1872), A Modern Instance (1882), and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Howells preferred novels he wrote after he encountered Tolstoy’s writings and was persuaded by them, as he said, to “set art forever below humanity.” In such later novels as Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), he chose characters not only because they were commonplace but also because the stories he told about them were commentaries upon society, government, and economics. The naturalists
Other American writers toward the close of the 19th century moved toward naturalism, a more advanced stage of realism. Hamlin Garland’s writings exemplified some aspects of this development when he made short stories and novels vehicles for philosophical and social preachments and was franker than Howells in stressing the harsher details of the farmer’s struggles and in treating the subject of sex. Main-Travelled Roads (1891) and Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895) displayed Garland’s particular talents. These and a critical manifesto for the new fiction, Crumbling Idols (1894), were influential contributions to a developing movement.
Other American authors of the same period or slightly later were avowed followers of French naturalists led by Émile Zola. Theodore Dreiser, for instance, treated subjects that had seemed too daring to earlier realists and, like other Naturalists, illustrated his own beliefs by his depictions of characters and unfolding of plots. Holding that men’s deeds were “chemical compulsions,” he showed characters unable to direct their actions. Holding also that “the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong,” he showed characters defeated by stronger and more ruthless opponents. His major books included Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and—much later—An American Tragedy (1925).
Dreiser did not bother with—or did not care for—niceties of style or elaborate symbolism such as were found in French naturalistic works; but Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were attentive to such matters. In short novels, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and in some of his short stories, Crane was an impressionist who made his details and his setting forth of them embody a conception of man overwhelmed by circumstance and environment. Frank Norris, who admired Crane’s “aptitude for making phrases—sparks that cast a momentary gleam upon whole phases of life,” himself tried to make phrases, scenes, and whole narratives cast such gleams in McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903). Both Crane and Norris died young, their full abilities undeveloped but their experiments foreshadowing later achievements in the 20th-century novel. Henry James
In the books of Henry James, born in New York but later an expatriate in England, fiction took a different pathway. Like realists and naturalists of his time, he thought that fiction should reproduce reality. He conceived of reality, however, as twice translated—first, through the author’s peculiar experiencing of it and, second, through his unique depicting of it. Deep insight and thorough experience were no more important, therefore, than the complicated and delicate task of the artist. The Art of Fiction" class="md-crosslink">The Art of Fiction (1884), essays on novelists, and brilliant prefaces to his collected works showed him struggling thoroughly and consciously with the problems of his craft. Together, they formed an important body of discussion of fictional artistry.
