American Realism
American Realism was a style in art, music and literature that depicted contemporary social realities and the lives and everyday activities of ordinary people. The movement began in literature in the mid-19th century, and became an important tendency in visual art in the early 20th century. Whether a cultural portrayal or a scenic view of downtown New York City, American realist works attempted to define what was real.
See also: Ashcan School and American ModernismIn the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century a new generation of painters, writers and journalists were coming of age. Many of the painters felt the influence of older U.S. artists such as Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Thomas Pollock Anshutz, and William Merritt Chase. However they were interested in creating new and more urbane works that reflected city life and a population that was more urban than rural in the U.S. as it entered the new century.
Writers[edit]
Horatio Alger, Jr.[edit]
Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832-1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author whose principal output was formulaic rags-to-riches juvenile novels that followed the adventures of bootblacks, newsboys, peddlers, buskers, and other impoverished children in their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort. His novels, of which Ragged Dick is a typical example, were hugely popular in their day.[12]
Stephen Crane[edit]
Stephen Crane (1871–1900), born in Newark, New Jersey, had roots going back to the American Revolutionary War era, soldiers, clergymen, sheriffs, judges, and farmers who had lived a century earlier. Primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays, Crane saw life at its rawest in slums and on battlefields. His haunting Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage was published to great acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in the attention before he died at 28, having neglected his health. He has enjoyed continued success since his death—as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist. Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic American novel. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive girl whose uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love, and eager to escape her violent home, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but soon dies. Crane's earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist work.[13]
William Dean Howells[edit]
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) wrote fiction and essays in the realist mode. His ideas about realism in literature developed in parallel with his socialist attitudes. In his role as editor of the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine, and as the author of books such as A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells exerted a strong opinion and was influential in establishing his theories.[14][15]
Mark Twain[edit]
Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Early 19th-century American writers tended to be flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious—partially because they were still trying to prove that they could write as elegantly as the English. Ernest Hemingway in Green Hills of Africa wrote that many Romantics "wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making...They did not use the words that people have always used in speech, the words that survive in language." In the same essay, Hemingway stated that all American fiction comes from Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.[16][17] Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm. For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding outworn conventions. Twain is best known for his works Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Sam. R. Watkins[edit]
Sam. R. Watkins (1839–1901) was a 19th-century American writer and humorist best known for his memoir Co. Aytch, which recounts his life as a soldier in the Confederate States Army. He "talked in a slow humorous drawl" and demonstrated unusual prowess as a storyteller. One of the book's commendable qualities is its realism. In an age noted for romanticizing "the war" and the men who fought it, he wrote with surprising frankness. The Johnny Rebs of his pages are not all heroes. Soldier life as portrayed by Watkins had more of the dullness and suffering than of excitement and glory. He tells much of the crushing fatigue of long marches; the boredom and discomfort of the long winter lulls; the caprice and harshness of discipline; the incompetency of the officers; the periodic lapses of morale; the uncertainty and meagerness of rations; and the wearying grind of army routine. His accounts of battle make frequent reference to the dreadful screaming of shells, the awful horror of mutilated bodies, and the agonizing cries of the wounded. War as detailed by his pen was a cruel and sordid business.[18]
Others[edit]
Other writers of this sort included Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Margaret Deland, Edith Wharton,[19] Ambrose Bierce, and J. D. Salinger.
Music[edit]
James Allen Bland[edit]
James A. Bland (1854–1919) was the first prominent African-American songwriter[22] and is known for his ballad, Carry me Back to Old Virginny. "In the Evening by the Moonlight" and "Golden Slippers" are well-known songs that he wrote, and he wrote other hits of the period, including "In the Morning by the Bright Light" and "De Golden Wedding". Bland wrote most of his songs from 1879 to 1882; in 1881, he left the U.S. for England with Haverly's Genuine Colored Minstrels. Bland found England more rewarding than the United States and stayed there until 1890; either he stopped writing songs during this period or he was unable to find an English publisher.[22]
C.A. White[edit]
C.A. White (1829–1892) wrote the hit song "Put Me in My Little Bed" in 1869, establishing him as a major songwriter. White was a songwriter of serious aspirations: Many of his songs were written for vocal quartets. He also made several attempts at opera. As half-owner of the music publishing firm White, Smith & Company, he had a ready outlet for his work, but it was his songs that supported the publishing firm and not the other way around. White did not scorn writing for the popular stage—indeed he wrote a song for the pioneering African-American stage production Out of Bondage—but his principal output was for the parlor singer.[23]
W.C. Handy[edit]
W. C. Handy (1873–1958) was a blues composer and musician, often known as the "Father of the Blues". Handy remains among the most influential of American songwriters. Although he was one of many musicians who played the distinctively American form of music known as the blues, he is credited with giving it its contemporary form. While Handy was not the first to publish music in the blues form, he took the blues from a not very well known regional music style to one of the dominant forces in American music. Handy was an educated musician who used folk material in his compositions. He was scrupulous in documenting the sources of his works, which frequently combined stylistic influences from several performers. He loved this folk-musical form and brought a transforming touch to it.[24]
Scott Joplin[edit]
Scott Joplin (c. 1867/68–1917) was an African-American musician and composer of ragtime music and remains the best-known figure. His music enjoyed a considerable resurgence of popularity and critical respect in the 1970s, especially for his most famous composition "The Entertainer".[25]