Namangan davlat universiteti ingliz filologiyasi fakulteti amaliy ingliz tili kafedrasi

10-Mavzu. 
Realism in the XX century`s American literature.
Realist literature is defined particularly as the fiction produced in Europe and the United States from 
about 1840 until the 1890s, when realism was superseded by naturalism. This form of realism began in 
France in the novels of Gustave Flaubert and the short stories of Guy de Maupassant. In Russia, 
realism was represented in the plays and short stories of Anton Chekhov. The novelist George Eliot 
introduced realism into English fiction; as she declared in Adam Bede (1859), her purpose was to give 
a “faithful representation of commonplace things.”Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were the 
pioneers of realism in the United States. One of the greatest realists of all, the Anglo-American 
novelist Henry James, drew much inspiration from his mentors, Eliot and Howells. James's concern 
with character motivation and behavior led to the development of a subgenre, the psychological novel. 
In general, the work of these writers illustrates the main tenet of realism, that writers must not select 
facts in accord with preconceived aesthetic or ethical ideals but must set down their observations 
impartially and objectively. Concerned with the faithful representation of life, which frequently lacks 
form, the realists tended to downplay plot in favor of character and to concentrate on middle-class life 
and preoccupations, avoiding larger, more dramatic issues. 
One of the American poets whose works emerged directly from Negro folklore was Langston 
Hughes. He kept to folklore traditions, and all his poetry was devoted to Negro problems. Hughes also 
wrote short stories, novels and plays. In his later years he was a journalist and editor of Negro 
publication. 
Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Missouri. His parents moved from place to place in the 
search for a chance to make a living. Since it was very difficult practically impossible for Negroes to 
get good jobs in the States. Langston’s father decided to go to the city of Mexico taking his wife and 
child, and his wife’s mother with him. But on their arrival a terrible earthquake took place, and his 
mother refused to stay. She said she wanted to live in a place where there were no earthquakes and 
where people spoke English. The father wanted to stay and the parents separated. Langston did not see 
his father again till he was 17. 
Langston went back to New England with his mother and grandmother where they lived in 
great poverty. Negro families were charged double rent for the rooms, and in order to make a living 
Langston’s mother to ten different jobs before Langston was 12 years old. 
All his life Langston remembered his grandmother who looked very much like an Indian: 
”cooper-colored with long black hair”. She was very proud and would beg or borrow anything from 
anybody. She used to Langston stories about the people who had so much to set the Negroes free. She 
told him how the first husband of her mother had been killed. Her mother, an Indian girl from the 
Cherokee tribe, had married freeman, Sheridan Leary, and they had lived Oberlin, Minnesota. She was 
with child when her husband went away, and nobody knew where he had gone. All that he had told her 
was that he was going on a trip. A few weeks later he was brought back to her full of bullet holes. He 
was one of those who had joined John Brown’s group and he had been killed in that historic raid at 
Harper’s Terry. 
Hughes wrote: “Though my grandmother’s stories always life moved, moved heroically toward 
an end ”. He said that nobody ever cried in his grandmother’s stories. They worked, or schemed, or 
fought. But no crying. He said that when his grandmother died, he did not cry either. Something about 
his grandmother’s stories had taught him uselessness of tears. 
Because they had to move from place so much Langston often had to change schools. In some 
towns there was no schools for colored children and he had to go to a school where he was the only 
colored child. It was in these schools that he witnessed racial injustice. During the summer vocation he 
worked as a delivery boy to help his mother. But his free time he spent reading books. Despite all 
difficulties he did succeed in getting a secondary education; he graduated from High School in 
Cleveland, Ohio. 
During the next four years Hughes worked at various jobs at large department stores and 
hotels, eating butter bread of the economic slavery in which colored people were kept in America. In 
1921, with the help of his father, he entered Columbia University in New York but finding the 
environment distasteful or worse, he left the University a year later and decided to travel. 

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Hughes signed up with a ship sailing for America. His first cruise as a sailor took him to the 
Canary Islands and the west coast of Africa. In his early poem he described the exotic beauty of 
Africa, the primitive life of the Negroes without exploitation and discrimination as he had seen it in his 
dreams. In 1924, at the age of 22 he made two voyages to Europe he went through a tremendous 
number of adventures. In Paris he found himself with only 7 dollars in his pocket. To save himself 
from starvation he again had to go in to service and do all the work he one else wanted to do. In 
Genua, Italy, he managed to get on a ship bound for the United States to reach\ home as a work away. 
On his return to America he lived and worked for some time in Washington. 
Langston Hughes’s literary career began in 1925 at a Washington hotel where the poet worked 
as a kitchen boy washing up dishes , or bus boy, who clears the tables. One night a traveling poet 
Vachel Lindsay arrived in the hotel. Langston knew him. He had read his works. Hughes told him that 
he lined his poems and that he was a poet too. Langston laid poems
 “Negro Dances”, “Wear Blues”
and 
“Garronid”
. The next morning on his way to work Hughes read in the paper that Vachel Lindsay 
had discovered or Negro boy poet. At the hotel the reporters, were already waiting for him. They 
interviewed him and they took his picture, holding up a hay of dirty dishes in the middle of dining 
room. Langston took part in a poetry contest and won the first prize. The poems Hughes wrote at the 
time were like the songs he heard in neighborhoods where the poor Negroes lived: ”gay songs, 
because you had to be gay or die, sad songs, because you could not help living and you kept on going”

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