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1. American Literature in the late 1880s.
The United States may be a relatively young country by global standards, but American literary history stretches back centuries. Following the Civil War, American literature was marked by a deep skepticism, understandable given the historical context. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American literary realism, in the works of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and others, was marked by attempts to present realistic things as they are, without supernatural or speculative elements. Twain’s vigorous, colloquial style in works such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a shot across the bow at tired conventions. American naturalism, heavily influenced by the works of Frank Norris, stood in the middle ground between romanticism and realism; for instance, Stephen Crane’s short story The Open Boat, a naturalistic depiction of a group of shipwreck survivors, explores themes of the indifference of the universe. From the same current as realism, literature progressed to American modernism in the interwar period, with some of the most famous works penned by the «Lost Generation» 5 of expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Modernist works drew from the pain and loss of direction that this generation experienced in the wake of World War One, but it also contained themes of hope as individuals could change their surroundings.After Americans discovered the harshness of the Civil War and life on the frontier, American authors attempted to represent ordinary, everyday life instead of imagined and fanciful events. Because of this, the works of the Realism period revolved around the lives of common people. With these works, themes like that of survival and violence were commonly used to portray the harsh side of reality. These two themes can be seen in the majority of Mark Twain's works, and specifically in Stephen Crane's An Episode of War. Naturalist authors also often included the themes of fate and the struggle between man and nature. The theme of fate can be seen Mary Chesnut's Civil War when she talks about God keeping her husband safe. Naturalist elements can also be seen in An Episode of War when the mud slows down the main character's medical treatment.Famous authors of this 6time :
Stephen Crane: "An Episode of War", The Red Badge of Courage
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Ambrose Bierce: "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Frederick Douglass: My Bondage and My Freedom, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Abraham Lincoln: The Gettysburg Address
Jack London: The call of the Wild and so on.
War, Migration, Desegregation, and Social Revolution
We use World War II as the outer boundary of this period, during the second wave of the Great Migration. Many African Americans headed for economic opportunity in the major war industries or went abroad to fight. Truman created the Commission on Civil Rights in 1947. In 1954 there was Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education which desegregated public schools. In 1955 Alabama saw the Bus Boycott which began the «nonviolent protest movement.»African American literary production from the 1940s to the 1960s is emphatically northern, urban, and set mainly in the black American culture capitals: Chicago, Boston, and Harlem. White youth copied the zoot suit vogue, along with many elements of bop, or hip talk. This language of hip, or the «new poetry of the proletariat» introduced a distinctly black urban idiom into the American language. Urban sensibility pervades the literature with the signs, sights, and sounds of the city. Setting the tone was Richard Wright’s 1940 publishing sensation Native Son.7
Urban Realism At least in strictly literary terms, Wright’s novel christened the 1940s decade. A book of the Month Club selection, Native Son made Wright the first African American writer to receive both critical acclaim and commercial success simultaneously. After him, other black writers began to be noticed.Wright is credited with having set the stage for these successes and creating publishing opportunities for many black writers.Native Son greatly transformed American culture and African American letters of the post-World War II era. Wright, along with Alain Locke and others, set a tone that black writers should no longer care for or serve their white audience. Their work should be focused on true self-expression for their own people about their own issues.Wright used ingredients from Marxism, social protest, urban and secular ideas. Native Son shaped a radically new agenda and established for African American writing a new center of gravity, one that documented the gritty realities of urban living for black Americans filtered through the lenses of urban sociology and the conventions of naturalism.Wright began investigating the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, especially its theories about juvenile delinquency and the urban environment. What forces and powers were at play in the social environment? He used his character of Bigger Thomas to show how the environment affects the mind, body, and spirit and this technique was seen as a form of social protest.Social protest writing did not begin with Wright; it was there in the fugitive slave narrative, the abolitionist orator, poets, essays, pamphlets, letters, and in the novels of racial uplift. With the emergence of Richard Wright, black art and social protest were one and the same8. Protest not only blended optimally with the aesthetics of naturalism and the reportorial practices of journalism and urban sociology but worked organically with a range of cultural activity–including grassroots organizing–underpinning a self-styled radical literary and intellectual movement.Other writers have been associated with the Wright style. William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge, Chester Himes’s The Lonely Crusade and If He Hollers Let Him Go, Ann Petry’s The Street.In the United States, the 1890s were marked by a severe economic depression sparked by the Panic of 1893. This economic crisis would help bring about the end of the so-called "Gilded Age", and coincided with numerous industrial strikes in the industrial workforce. The period was sometimes referred to as the "Mauve Decade", because William Henry Perkin's aniline dye allowed the widespread use of that color in fashion.9
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