Unit 5: American Literature

Regionalism

Mark Twain

In many ways, this bloody divisive war dimmed American optimism, and for a time writers retreated from national themes. The country had been growing; as pioneers settled new territories in the West, writers now focused on the differences between the various regions of the United States rather than on a single vision of the expanding country. One of the most important leaders of this "regionalism" movement was William Dean Howells (1837-1920), who in 1866 became editor of the influential Atlantic magazine. Howells published stories from all over the United States, and in his literary reviews he praised writers who described local life realistically. The raw mining camps and settlements of the far West were brought to life by storytellers such as Bret Harte, in The Luck of Roaring Camp, and a newspaper correspondent named Samuel Clemens (1835-1910), who wrote under the pen name of Mark Twain.

The Mississippi River

Mark Twain was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast. He grew up in a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River and received only a basic public school education. He began working in a printer's shop when he was still a boy, and this experience led to a series of newspaper jobs in the Midwest and the West. Twain was a new voice, an original genius, a man of the people, and he quickly won readers. He captured a peculiarly American sense of humor, telling outrageous jokes and tall tales in a calm, innocent, matter-of-fact manner. He sometimes used local dialect for comic effect, but even his normal prose style sounded distinctively American—rich in metaphor, newly invented words and drawling rhythms.

Twain had a cynical streak that matched the country's skeptical post-Civil War mood. He soon developed beyond merely "regional" stories and turned to comic novels. His shrewd social satire was most apparent in books such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but perhaps his greatest book is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). This is the story of a boy running away from home and steering a raft down the Mississippi River, but it is more than that. The people the boy meets cover the entire spectrum of humanity, and his voyage down the river becomes a metaphor for a journey through life. Funny, powerful, humane and laced with social commentary and criticism, Huckleberry Finn has been called the greatest novel in American literature.

While prose fiction in the United States was developing in vital imaginative ways, poetry seemed to recede as an art form. The poetic giant Whitman died in the 1880s, as did a poet who has been admired by later generations, but who was barely known while she lived. This unrecognized poet was Emily Dickinson (1830-1886).Her poetry mixed gaiety and gloom. During the last 25 years of her life, she rarely left the grounds of the Dickinson household in Amherst, Massachusetts. But her imagination took her on long flights of fancy. Her verses are filled with the names of faraway,

A Play about Emily Dickinson

exotic places that she visited only in imagination. On the other hand, she could make poetic drama out of things close at hand--a cracked plate on a shelf in the dining room or the sound of a honeybee in the garden. She was fascinated by life. She was also more than a little in love with death. Of the 1500 poems she composed, more than 600 have to do with dying. Almost all of her poems are brief, rarely more than 12 or 15 lines long. But in small spaces she packed an emotional charge of surprising force.

Previous Page        Next Page