Other local colour writers

• Regional writing after the Civil War –

recovery, celebration of a vanishing
social order, nostalgia for the past

Sydney Lanier (1842-81)

• Southern poet born in Georgia
• Tiger-Lilies (1867): a novel
• The Science of English Verse (1880)
• His poetry is romantic, conventional,

expressing nostalgia for the past

• Musical compositions about Georgia's

fields, rivers, and shores, e.g. „Corn”

• traditional southern agriculture as

offering the best hope for the South

• belief in the redemptive power of the

land

Kate Chopin (1851-1904)

• one of the first feminist authors of

the 20th century

• stories set in Louisiana
• two short story collections: Bayou

Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie
(1897)

• novel The Awakening (1899)
• slavery and women's rights
• exploration of women's

independence

Realist writers

William Dean Howells (1837 - 1920)

• „the Dean of American Letters”
• American author and literary critic
• champion of literary realism
• close friend and adviser of Mark

Twain and Henry James

• biography of Abraham Lincoln
• editor of The Atlantic Monthly

• reviews and articles that interpreted

American writers

• The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), his

best known work

• Criticism and Fiction (1891): basic

tenets of realism

• ‘fidelity to life’ : realism as "nothing

more and nothing less than the truthful
treatment of material"

Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)

• detailed description of the Midwest
• Crumbling Idols (1894), a collection

of essays

• “veritism,” a theory of realistic

fiction: socially conscious realism
combined with more individualistic
and subjective elements

• Main-Travelled Roads (1891), a

collection of stories: Midwestern farm
life