Content Introduction I chapter Ancient American Literature

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 (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.


James, Henry
Henry James, glass plate negative, c. 1910.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ggbain-04703)


An excellent short-story writer, James nevertheless was chiefly important for novels in which his doctrines found concrete embodiment. Outstanding were The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The earliest of these were international novels wherein conflicts arose from relationships between Americans and Europeans—each group with its own characteristics and morals. As time passed, he became increasingly interested in the psychological processes of his characters and in a subtle rendering of their limited insights, their perceptions, and their emotions.

Critics of the gilded age

Writers of many types of works contributed to a great body of literature that flourished between the Civil War and 1914—literature of social revolt. Novels attacked the growing power of business and the growing corruption of government, and some novelists outlined utopias. Political corruption and inefficiency figured in Henry Adams’s novel Democracy (1880). Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) was both an indictment of the capitalistic system and an imaginative picturing of a utopia achieved by a collectivist society in the year 2000. Howells’s Traveler from Altruria (1894) pleaded for an equalitarian state in which the government regimented men’s lives. The year 1906 saw the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, first of many works by him that criticized U.S. economic and political life and urged socialism as the remedy.
Two poets embodied criticisms in songs. Edwin Markham’s “Man with the Hoe” (1899) was a protest against the exploitation of labour and vaguely threatened revolution; it immediately stimulated nationwide interest. A year later William Vaughn Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation” denounced growing U.S. imperialism as a desertion of earlier principles; his “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” (1901) developed the same theme even more effectively.

With the rise of journalistic magazines, a group of journalists became notable as critics of America—the group dubbed “the muckrakers” by Theodore Roosevelt. Ida M. Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) and Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904) were typical contributions by two members of a large group of journalistic crusaders.