page_671 < previous page page_671 next page > Page 671 wait until the twentieth century to win the critical esteem that the nineteenth century bestowed on Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" (1865), which is hardly read today. Whitman had only a small cult following in the seventies and eighties, though by the 1890s he had won the esteem of poets in England and the United States. Melville had to subsidize publication of his poetry; his modern reputation is generally dated from 1915 when an English biographer began the renewal of interest. Emily Dickinson had written well over half her 1,775 poems by 1865 and she continued to write until her death in 1886, but she did not publish. Her posthumous volumes  heavily emended  won a fair-sized audience in the 1890s, but her work was not properly edited until the 1950s and her recognition is still in progress. E. A. Robinson began publishing in the 1890s, but his work was too plainspoken and somber for the prevailing taste. He did not begin to win a regular audience until his fifth volume, The Man against the Sky (1916). Robert Frost also began writing in the 1890s, but he went virtually unpublished until, with some help from Pound, he brought out A Boy's Will in London in 1913. For the greatest prose master of the period there was no such delay of recognition. Mark Twain became a national figure with "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in 1867, and he remained one until his death in 1910. As Samuel Clemens of Hannibal, Missouri, he had been brought up to the ways of the smalltown middle class and he had absorbed the oral traditions of the Middle West and the South. As a Mississippi steamboatman, a would-be bonanza miner, and a frontier journalist, he shared in the newly released energies of his expanding country. In The Innocents Abroad (1869) he developed the contrast between unpolished, plain-thinking figures who spoke in the lowdown vernacular and the conventional creatures of polite society. Modulating the raciness of local speech with the flow and clarity of standard plain prose, he created an American idiom. The comic interplay between vernacular character and thoughtless conventionality, when slavery and freedom were at issue in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), became enlarged to the theme of nature versus civilization and disclosed subversive and tragic possibilities. Mark Twain's recognition by the educated middle class dates from 1875 when William Dean Howells published Old Times on the Mississippi in the Atlantic Monthly. His conversion from newspaper humorist and popular lecturer into an Atlantic author bespoke an intellectual hospitality on the part of editors and readers. The widening of public taste paralleled a widening of audience  high school education was spreading to towns all over the country. Monthly magazines, supported by advertisers and national circulation, became the dominant medium, creating a seemingly limitless need for new material. Local-color writers of sketches and tales helped satisfy the demand of the new literary market. Regional fiction had begun before the Civil War. Harriet Beecher Stowe started the first of her New England novels even before writing Uncle Tom's Cabin; the most famous of these, Oldtown Folks, came out in 1869 when the new movement was well under way. The brevity of the magazine piece lent itself to cottage industry and brought many women into professional writing. (Their numbers do not negate the difficulty of a woman's becoming a writer, especially a middle-class married woman, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman bore witness in her brilliant story of 1892, "The Yellow Wallpaper.") The magazine story provided a structure for the loosely related sketch-tales of Sarah Orne Jewett's masterly Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), and it did not obstruct the passing of some of Jewett's qualities to a similarly austere writer, Willa Cather. Cather's very different career was well launched before the First World War  her early novel O Pioneers! came out in 1913. At the least, local color  that is, regional difference  allowed minor writers to vary the content of their work. At their best, writers caught local language and folkways that were in danger of disappearing beneath a uniform national culture. Southern writers often elaborated a plantation legend of magnolias, crinoline, and sweet sentiment, such as can be seen in the frame narrative of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories (first collected in 1880). But the  < previous page page_671 next page >