American realism and the frontier

Between the Civil War and the crash of 1929, the American novel left European romance for an inventory of the country: a raft on the Mississippi, a Midwestern realtor who repeats his club's slogans, two farmhands dreaming of a farm, a wolf-dog in the Far North. Twain brought ordinary speech into literature, Dreiser followed an ambitious young man to the electric chair, Cather wrote the prairie and the immigrants. The frontier closes, the city and the factory take its place, and the novel records it.

works 8

• Short storiesThe Luck of Roaring Camp and Other SketchesBret Harte · 1870Twenty years after the gold rush, the California of the 1850 camps no longer exists; these stories fix its cast of characters, from the gambler to the fallen woman.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe Adventures of Tom SawyerMark Twain · 1876The book looks at childhood from the outside, with the complicity of the adult who remembers it and the irony of one who has seen what the small town was worth.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe Rise of Silas LaphamWilliam Dean Howells · 1885A middle class enriched within a single generation clashes with the old families of Boston. The novel seats them at the same table and listens to what one hears when the other speaks.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelWhite FangJack London · 1906This novel is a companion to a book by the same author in which a dog went back to the wild, and it follows the opposite path.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelBabbittSinclair Lewis · 1922The America of the twenties celebrates itself through its service clubs, its banquet speeches and its automobiles. This novel draws up the record of it, in the very language of those who speak it.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelOne of OursWilla Cather · 1922This 1922 novel shows a young man for whom the war of 1914 was a deliverance, which led to its author being attacked.Literature
• NovelAn American TragedyTheodore Dreiser · 1925The country tells itself at this time that any man can rise if he wants to. This novel takes a boy who has been given nothing, puts that promise into his head, and follows what it makes of him.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelOf Mice and MenJohn Steinbeck · 1937Tens of thousands of men then follow the harvests in California, sleeping in the ranch bunkhouses and moving on with the season. This book takes two who, unusually, travel together.Literature