Late 1800s (realism)

• Realism, Later Naturalism


  Late 1800s
• Abraham Lincoln - Gettysburg Address, Second Inaugural Address
• Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin: Life Among the Lowly (Vermonter plantation owner)
• Uncle Tom's Cabin

  • Simon Legree beats slave Uncle Tom to death
  • Uncle Tom cared for owner Augustine St. Clare's daughter Little Eva
  • Others include mulatto Eliza, impish black child Topsy, Miss Ophelia St. Clare, and slave catcher Marks
• George Washington Cable - Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes A Story of Creole Live (Frowenfeld learns of De Grapion vs. Grandissimes family feud; African king Bras Coupe tortured to death)
• Joel Chandler Harris - Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (black servant tells white boy tales involving Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and Tar Baby)
• Francis Hopkinson Smith - Colonel Carter of Cartersville
• Kate O'Flaherty Chopin - The Awakening
• Sarah Orne Jewett - The Country of the Pointed Firs
• Bret Harte - The Luck of the Roaring Camp (miners adopt Thomas Luck, son of dying prostitute Cherokee Sal, but he dies in Kentuck's arms in flood), The Outcast of Poker Flat (gambler John Oakhurst, two prostitutes, and a drunkard sacrifice themselves in a blizzard to save young eloping couple)
• Joaquin Miller - (poems)
• James Whitcomb Riley - Little Orphan Annie, The Raggedy Man (boy admires farm hand)
• Sidney Lanier - The Marshes of Glynn (sea marshes of Glynn County GA), The Revenge of Hamish
• George Santayana - Sonnets and Other Verses, The Last Puritan (A Memoir in the Form of a Novel; Puritan Oliver Alden out of place in 1900s)
• Paul Laurence Dunbar - Lyrics of a Lowly Life
• Emily Dickinson - Poems (not famous until long after her death)
• Humor Writers

  • Josh Billings - Josh Billings His Sayings
  • Petroleum V. Nasby -The Nasby Papers
  • Artemus Ward - Artemus Ward His Book
  • Finley Peter Dunne - Mr. Dooley's Opinions
• Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) - The Celbrated Jumping Fog of Calaveras County (Simon Wheeler narrators, Jim Smiley bets his frog Dan'l Webster can outjump any; stranger pours quail shot in frog), The Innocents Abroad (travel letters from Europe; burlesqued sentimental travel books), Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi (autobiographical; river loses its romance over 7 years), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Tom Sawyer, cared for by Aunt Polly, and friend Huck Finn witness murder by Injun Joe in cemetery but run away in fear to Jackson's Island; they return to witness their funerals; Tom testifies at trial of falsely accused Muff Potter; Tom and Becky Thatcher get lost in cave with Injun Joe but escape), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (narrated by Huck, who escapes from drunken father and journeys down Mississippi River with runaway slave Jim), Pudd'nhead Wilson (lawyer David Wilson exposes that Roxy's mulatto son murdered his uncle and accused Luigi), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Tom Sawyer Detective, The Gilded Age, The Mysterious Stranger (Satan disguised as Philip Traum disillusions boy in 1590 Eseldorf Austria), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (stranger leaves sack of money [actually lead] in a bank in Hadleyburg and sends letters to 19 telling them how to claim it), The Prince and the Pauper (Edward VI and pauper Tom Canty switch places for several days), 1601 ("Conversation as It Was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors")
• Louisa May Alcott - Little Women (Meg mares tutor John Brooke; Beth likes music but dies young; fashionable Amy marries Laurie; tomboyish and literary Jo marries German professor Mr. Bhaer), Little Men (Meg and John Brooke have twins Daisy and Demi), Jo's Boys (Jo and Mr. Bhaer turn their home into school for boys)
• William Dean Howells - Criticism and Fiction, A Modern Instance (Squire Gaylord tries to prevent Bartley Hubbard from divorcing his daughter Marcia; Ben Halleck debates marrying divorced Marcia), The Rise of Silas Lapham (Silas Lapham and wife Persis grow rich from Back Bay paint mine on his farm and build home on Beacon Hill and try to acclimate to rich social scene; daughter Penelope marries Tom Corey and goes to Mexico; family is financially ruined), A Hazard of New Fortunes (Dryfoos moves to NY and makes son Conrad publisher of a magazine; Basil March refuses to fire a socialist; Conrad is killed in a labor riot), A Chance Acquaintance (Kitty Ellison loves Miles Arbuton as they travel on St. Lawrence River but he ignores her), A Traveller from Altruria (Aristides Homos likes utopia Altruria with democratic Christian socialist government)
• Deam Hamlin Garland - Main-Traveled Roads
• Stephen Crane - The Red Badge of Courage (study of fear in US Civil War soldier Henry Fleming), Maggie A Girl of the Streets (Maggie Johnson in NY slums is seduced by bartender Pete, becomes a prostitute, and commits suicide), The Open Boat (captain, cook, oiler, and correspondent escape sinking ship on small boat; oiler dies as they come ashore), The Black Riders and Other Lines, War Is Kind (poems, including Do Not Weep Maiden for War Is Kind), Whilomville Stores (stories set in Port Jervis NY; in Lynx-Hunting Jimmie Trescott shoots a cow), The Blue Hotel (Swede comes to Nebraska looking for romantic violence), The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (Sheriff Jack Potter, who has no gun, encounters Scratchy Wilson)
• Frank Norris - The Octopus (CA wheat farmers battle the railroad; love affair of Vanamee; The Pit sequel), McTeague (McTeague prevented from practicing dentistry and murders wife Trina who had won $5000 in a lottery; he kills Marcus Schouler but is handcuffed to the corpse and dies of thirst in the desert)
• Helen Hunt Jackson - A Century of Dishonor (US treatment of Indians), Ramona (Scottish-Indian Ramona elopes with Indian Alessandro)
• Ambrose Gwinett Bierce - In the Midst of Life (26 stories; young soldiers die), The Devil's Dictionary
• Jacob Riis - How the Other Half Lives
• Jack London - The Sea Wolf (literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden is shipwrecked in SF Bay and rescued by Wolf Larsen on the Ghost, who makes him work as cabin boy; Maude Brewster also rescued; Ghost wrecks and blinded Larsen prevents its repair), The Call of the Wild (dog Buck taken from CA to Klondike; kills lead dog Spitz; owner John Thornton killed by Indians), White Fang (wolf-dog White Fang is abused by first owner but rescued and tamed by mining engineer Weedon Scott in CA; Fang defends Scott from convict), Martin Eden
• David Graham Phillips - Susan Lenox Her Fall and Rise
• Upton Sinclair - The Jungle (Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and wife Ono work in early 1900s Chicago stockyard)
• Theodore Dreiser - Sister Carrie (country girl Carrie Meeber saved from cruel 1890s Chicago by salesman Charles Drouet; George Hurstwood takes her to NY and she becomes actress but he kills self), Trilogy (The Financier, The Titan, The Stoic), An American Tragedy (Clyde Griffiths seduces Roberta Alden but loves Sondra Finchly; plans to murder Roberta but lacks the courage; fails to rescue Roberta when boat overturns; charged with murder; based on story of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown 1906)
• Henry James - The American (Christopher Newman, an unsophisticated American, loves Claire de Bellegarde but opposed by aristocratic family; he decides not to reveal her mom and brother murdered her father), The Aspern Papers (former mistress of poet Jeffrey Aspern won't let his poems be published), The Awkward Age (Nanda Brookenham and her mom love Vanderbank), The Bostonians (post-Civil War Boston: Olive Chancellor, a radical feminist, and Basil Ransom, a MS Confederate veteran, compete for Verena Tarrant; Miss Birdseye), Portrait of a Lady (Isabel Archer marries Gilbert Osmond in Italy; Isabel becomes disillusioned but stays to raise Pansy, daughter of Gilbert and Madame Merle), The Wings of the Dove (Kate Croy loves English journalist Merton Densher but gets him to marry dying friend Milly Theale to inherit her money; Densher cannot accept money or promise he doesn't love memory of Milly so Kate leaves), The Ambassadors (New England and France: Lambert Strether sent to Paris by fiancee Mrs. Newsome to get her son Chad who loves Madame de Vionnet), The Golden Bowl (Prince Amerigo marries Maggie Verver but has affair with Maggie's friend Charlotte Stant; Charlotte marries Maggie's dad Adam Verver), The Turn of the Screw (governess, in love with employer, cares for orphans Miles and Flora, who are under evil influence of the ghosts of Peter Quint, ex-stewart, and Miss Jessel, ex-governess), Roderick Hudson (American sculptor Roderick Hudson, who loves Christina Light, goes to Rome and becomes disillusioned), The Princess of Casamassima (Princess Casamassima, formerly Christiana Light, studies poverty in London and meets radical Hyacinth Robinson), The Passionate Pilgrim and Other Stories (Clement Searle goes to England to claim rich estate but dies), The Spoils of Pynton (Owen Gereth refuses to marry Fleda Vetch so his mom removes art treasures from his house; he marries Mona Brigstock and offers Fleda art but house burns down), What Maisie Knew (12-year-old Maisie Farange spends 6 months with each of divorced parents, each of whom are remarried and having affairs again), Notes on Novelists, The Sacred Fount (older partner is refreshed and younger depleted in marriage), The Art of the Novel, Daisy Miller (narrator Frederick Winterbourne regrets rigid adherence to European conventions when Daisy Miller dies of Roman fever), The Europeans (artist Felix Young and his sister Baroness Munster visit relatives the Wentworths in Boston)
• WEB Du Bois - Souls of Black Folk, The Quest for the Silver Fleece
• Frank J. Webb - The Garies and Their Friends
• Sutton Griggs - Imperium in Imperio
• Charles Chesnutt - The Conjure Woman, The Marrow of a Tradition
• James Parton - biographies of Greeley, Jefferson, and others
• George Bancroft - History of the United States
• William Hickling Prescott - History of the Conquest of Mexico
• Henry Brooks Adams - History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, The Education of Henry Adams
• Henry George - (economist) Progress and Poverty