2. Southern writers.

The South, which was economically and spiritually destroyed by the Civil War, produced very little important literature in the post war years. The best poet was SIDNEY LANIER (1842-1881). He is remembered by his Marshes of Glynn. It describes how a poet becomes closer to nature as he approaches old age. He learns from nature that death the doorway to eternity. Lanier also wrote an important book on how to write poetry, The Science of English Verse.

GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844-1925) was another Southern writer. He was a close friend of Mark Twain and often toured the country with him, giving lectures. An important “local color” writer, he specialized in the life of the Creoles (French whites living in the New Orleans region). In such stories as Parson Jove, he showed the amusing differences between Creole culture and the neighboring Protestant culture of the South.

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS was the most interesting Southern writer in the post-Civil war period. Although he was white, he popularized Negro folklore. In his Uncle Remus tales, an old slave tells stories to a white child. They are all animal stories, but all the animals act just like humans. The heroes are usually: a little rabbit and his old enemy fox. They symbolize slaves and their masters.

3. The rise of American realism.

William Dean Howells (1837-1920) created the first theory for American realism. He had many important followers. Under him, realism became the “mainstream” of American literature. In 1891, he became the editor of Harper’s Monthly in New York City. He made Harper’s into a weapon against literary “romanticism”. He felt that such works created false views about life. And as editor, he was able to help younger novelists like Halin Galand and Stephen Crane. He was also a friend and supporter of Mark Twain and Henry James.

Howells put his realist theories into practice in his novels. The theme of A Modern Instance (1882), one of his earlier novels, shocked the public. It was about Divorce, a subject which was not talked and written about openly. His characters are very complex and very unromantic. The author blames society for their troubles. This is a position he took in many of his later novels as well.

Howells’s next novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), is about an ordinary, uneducated man who becomes rich in the paint business. It describes his unsuccessful attempt to join Boston’s “high society”. In the end, his paint business is ruined because he refuses to cheat other people. The novel contains a famous scene at a dinner party, in which the characters discuss literature.

Howells hates the romantic literature of such popular writers as Frank Stockton (1834-1902) and such historical romances as Ben-Hur (1880, by Lew Wallace). Such novels “make one forget life and all its cares and duties”, he wrote. He realized that business and businessmen were at the center of the society, and felt that novels should depict them. The good realist should be interested in “the common feelings of commonplace people”.

However, in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Howells seems to turn away from the “smiling aspects” of society. It is the story of a man who learns about the terrible suffering of poor people in society. From about this time, Howells himself was becoming a kind of socialist. This new outlook made him add a new law to his ideology of realism: art and the artist must serve the poor people of society. From then on, he began attacking the evils of American capitalism. Like Tolstoy, he argued for kindness and the unity of all people in society, rather than selfish competition. A little later, Howells began to write “utopian” novels about an ideal society with perfect justice and happiness. These included A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907).