1. The Realism War in American Literature
James, Twain, and Howells
The Realism War in American Literature

2. Nineteenth-century Definitions of Romance
Romance focuses “upon the extraordinary, the mysterious, the imaginary.” –Bliss Perry (1903)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: the romance “has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation” (Preface to The House of the Seven Gables)
Bliss Perry, Perry was editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

3. Romance and Realism
Events may be implausible or heightened versions of reality.
Characters may be symbolic rather than realistic; they may be obsessed with an issue or problem.
Language may be lofty or poetic.
Class and background are less important than the relationship of the individual to the main theme of the text.
Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance
Renders reality in detail.
Character is more important than action and plot.
Complex ethical choices are often the subject.
Language is vernacular, sometimes with dialect.
Class and background are important and play a role in the plot.
The Rise of Silas Lapham, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady

4. Romance and Realism: Taste and Class
Aspired to the ideal
Thought to be more genteel since it did not show the vulgar details of life
Realism
Thought to be more democratic
Critics stressed the potential for vulgarity and its emphasis on the commonplace
Potential “poison” for the pure of mind
A common complaint is that realistic works forced readers into proximity with people whom they would never invite for dinner.

5. W. D. Howells Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, 1871-1881
“Editor’s Study” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (January March 1892)
Criticism and Fiction (1891; collected from “Editor’s Study” columns)

6. Howells on Realism
“Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” --William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” November 1889.
P Howells wrote the “Editor’s Study” for Harper’s Monthly Magazine from January 1886 to March For links to all the articles online, go to

7. The Ideal Grasshopper
“We hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it Because it is not like a real grasshopper” --W. D. Howells, 1887
This selection from the “Editor’s Study” for December 1887 features Howells’s famous comparison between the “ideal grasshopper” drawn from art, the model to which most writers aspire, and the “real grasshopper,” the model from life which Howells says that writers should study instead.
Image courtesy of

8. The Smiling Aspects of Life
We invite our novelists, therefore, to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal in the individual rather than in the commonplace.” –W. D. Howells, 1886
This much-misunderstood passage from the “Editor’s Study” (September 1886) has been used to show Howells’s timidity as a realist in the “genteel tradition.” What he actually advocates is that realist writers look at life rather than affecting a fashionable level of gloom to imitate the works of Russian writers such as Doestoevsky. Howells goes on to add this equally optimistic statement: “It will not do to boast, but it is well to be true to the facts, and to see that, apart from these purely mortal troubles, the race here enjoys conditions in which most of the ills that have darkened its annals may be averted by honest work and unselfish behavior. It is only now and then, when some dark shadow of our shameful past appears, that we can believe there ever was a tragic element in our prosperity.”

9. Howells on James (Century 1882)
The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray These great men are of the past.
The new school derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others This school, which is so largely of the future as well as the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James.
This essay is sometimes cited as the one that started the “realism war,” although most of the debate occurred later in the 1880s and 1890s.

10. The Reaction A Literary Combination.
Mr. H-w-lls: Are you the tallest now, Mr. James?
Mr. J-mes (ignoring the question): Be so uncommonly kind, H-w-lls, as to let me down easy: it may be we have both got to grow.
From Punch. See Michael Anesko’s Letters, Fictions, Lives for a good account of the controversy.

11. Attack on Howells I
H. C. Vedder. “Can it be that Mr. Howells gives us in his books a fair representation of life as he has known it? Has his whole experience been of this stale, flat unprofitable sort?”
“Has he never known anybody who has a soul above buttons?” American Writers of Today, 1894.

12. Attack on Howells II: William Roscoe Thayer
French realism should be called “Epidermism,” not realism, because it reduces “literature, art, and morals to anarchy.”
The Rise of Silas Lapham was “produced by Epidermist methods” by an author who “smacked his lips” over Zola’s filth.

13. Maurice Thompson: Realism As Disease.
Realists represent “literary decadence” and worship “the vulgar, the commonplace, and the insignificant.”
The best part of Howells is “romance disguised as realism. His literary tissue is healthy, the spirit of his work is even, calm, just, and his purpose is pure,” so he cannot be a realist.
Picture is Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875).

14. Howells to James, 1915
“I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cast down and the grass growing over them in the pale moonlight” (Selected Letters 6: 31).

15. American Literary Movements
American Transcendentalism, (Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, William Ellery Channing)
(American Romanticism, 1830s through 1850s)
Domestic fiction, 1850s through 1870s
Local color or regional fiction, s
“Romantic revival” of adventure fiction, fables of empire, and and Aestheticism, 1890s-1910
Progressive Era social problem novels,
Modernism, 1920s-1940s (and continuing)
Social Realism, 1930s
And in the midst of these, beginning in

16. American Literary Naturalism
Begins in 1893 with Crane’s Maggie
Ends in (take your pick) . . .
, Progressive Era (Upton Sinclair, David Graham Phillips)
1920s, modernism (Evelyn Scott, John Dos Passos)
1939, end of social realism (John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Meridel Le Sueur)
1945, World War II (Norman Mailer)
1960s (Joyce Carol Oates)
Still continuing (Don DeLillo, in graphic novels, and so on)