What Movement Dominated Art and Literature During the Gilded Age? Quizlet

From America's Gilded Age: The Biltmore Mansion was built past George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895. Information technology is the largest privately owned house in the Usa, at 178,926 square feet.

American Literature Between the Civil War

and WW I

Learn More About Types of Literature in the Gilded Age:

Check out this post for an overview of American Literature popular in this era.

Meaning Historical Dates:

1868:  14th Amendment to Constitution (declares all U. S. born people U. S. citizens)

1870:  15th Subpoena ensures right to vote to citizens of all races

1877:  Federal troops removed from southern states (stop of Reconstruction, less protection for rights of African Americans in southern states)

1890:  Massacre at Wounded Knee

1895:  Booker T. Washington gives Atlanta Compromise speech

1896:  Plessy 5. Ferguson Supreme Court case upholds principle of separate but equal (allowing racial segregation)

1898:  Spanish-American War (USS Maine sunk, Dewey captures Philippines)

1906:  Upton Sinclair'southward The Jungle published; Pure Food and Drug Human action (created the FDA)

1909:  NAACP founded

1914:  WW I begins (Archduke Ferdinand assassinated)

American Literature from 1865-1914: Some Highlights

This listing includes many highlights from these years of American literature, but of class there are many more works from this era very much worth reading. Do you take a work in mind that you retrieve belongs on this listing? Electronic mail me at admin.mj@readgreatliterature.com, and I'll consider your proffer!

Related Mail service: My  New England Writer  Abode Tour: reflections on my visit to several of these authors' homes.

Emily Dickinson. Poems.

Emily Dickinson is one of America's nearly important poets. Dickinson lived from 1830-1886. She wrote near 1800 poems, only about ten of which were published in her lifetime, and those were heavily edited to reflect stylistic preferences of the day. How to cull amongst 1800 works?  I volition have to content myself with listing a few of the virtually famous ones, and urging you to explore her work farther. Dickinson's work is challenging, wry, irreverent, and intellectually bold. Her fashion is edgy, brilliant, and, fifty-fifty today, iconoclastic. For ideas on how to arroyo Dickinson's poesy, run into my postal service interpreting "Because I Could Non Cease for Expiry" and "I Felt a Funeral in my Encephalon." In addition, check out these poems: "Success is counted sweetest," "'Faith' is a fine invention," "I sense of taste a liquor never brewed," "Wild nights – Wild nights!," "I Like a Look of Agony," "A Bird, came down the Walk –," and "The Soul selects her own Guild-."

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1868.

If yous have never read this book, well, yous just take to! As well being a sugariness account of the babyhood and youth of four lively merely thoughtful, intelligent sisters, this classic novel submerges readers in an American time and civilization that has largely been forgotten. You may be surprised at how many Christian religious references there are, and how much talk near morality—not at all unusual for folks living in the American 19th century. It's a trip back into American time: take it!

Marker Twain (Samuel Clemons). The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885.

Twain's writing can be terrifically funny, caustic, satiric, fifty-fifty prophetic. Most readers won't be disturbed by reading almost the sentimentalized adventures of all-American scamp Tom Sawyer.  But The Adventures of Blueberry Finn, a more than important piece of work, may brand painful reading because of the frequent utilize of the "N" discussion and other racist descriptions, causing information technology to be banned today from many school reading lists and libraries. If you decide to take on that barrier, try approaching this seminal work with the perspective that Twain is not endorsing racism; instead, he is reporting and criticizing it. Huckleberry Finn satirizes the narrow, immoral views that average people widely accepted in his day. The indicate, theme, and purpose of Twain'due south book is to evidence that slavery and racism are profoundly, morally wrong.

The book also illustrates the characteristic American idea that a whole society and culture may exist less morally enlightened than one young, "uncivilized," yet simple loving heart. Huck's journey down the Mississippi with his friend Jim, the escaping slave, is by turns funny, sad, maddening, harrowing, and heartbreaking. But overall information technology is a journey toward Huck's moral understanding. Huck'southward journey is our American journeying. We are not all the way there yet; only books like this one preserve a record of a past time, assuasive united states to examine whether we take come at least some fashion since it was published in 1885.

Embrace blueprint for Huckleberry Finn by E. W. Kemble

Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings-The Folklore of the Old Plantation. 1880

Before the Civil War, Joel Chandler Harris was a journalist who spent fourth dimension on Turnwold Plantation, endemic past his mentor and dominate Joseph Addison Turner. Harris got to know some of the slaves who lived and worked there. Harris admired the way the African American people told stories, noting especially the fashion they focused on clever trickster figures similar "Brer Rabbit" who could use their wits and their story-telling abilities to thwart the villains who seemed more powerful than they were. Years after, Harris wanted to preserve this rich story-telling culture, and strove to write downward the tales he heard exactly the way they were told, including the dialect, interim in the role of a folklorist. Today it is non easy to read the dialect the way Harris wrote it downwards, merely if you lot push through that bulwark, y'all will encounter some charming and meaningful stories.

Charles Chestnutt, "The Goophered Grapevine," 1887

Chestnutt was an African American lawyer and fiction writer, born in Cleveland, Ohio of free black parents two years before the Civil War. Chestnutt was the starting time African American writer to be published in The Atlantic Monthly, and was ane of the first fiction writers to deal with bug of race after the Civil State of war. In this story, a Northern couple encounters a sometime slave on a southern vineyard they want to buy, who tells them a story that he says occurred on the site when a "conjure adult female" was hired to put a curse on the vineyard.  Mr. Julius MacAdoo tells the couple a very good tale, while Chestnutt's story as a whole gives readers a sense of how the culture was evolving in the postal service- Civil War era.

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, 1881; The Bostonians, 1886; The Ambassadors, 1903; and The Wings of the Pigeon, 1902.

Prolific, varied, achieved, and complex, James is one of America's most of import classic writers. He has written then many wonderful novels and tales, it is hard to choose from amid them; this list includes a range of celebrated works and illustrates the evolution of the famous Henry James fashion. These novels all besides showcase James'due south ability to probe the psychology of many kinds of minds. James can convey every dash of thought of major characters as they try to pause through advice defenses to figure out what the other characters are thinking and planning. James conceives of nearly every conversation as a conflict in which people maneuver for power and psychological control through their spoken language. The tone of James's novels is too circuitous, varying from comic to tragic and dorsum again. Thus none of these books are "quick reads," but all are fascinating, in-depth profiles of different kinds of Americans:

Portrait of a Lady : Isabel Archer, young, innocent, and full of life, comes to Europe to shape her own destiny. But subsequently unexpectedly becoming an heiress, she falls prey to two American expatriates who want to fool her out of her money, and her freedom.

The Bostonians : Focusing on the feminist movement in Boston in the 1880s, the novel tells the story of an inspired young speaker on the rights of women, Verena Tarrant, and the 2 people who fall in dear with her and endeavour to control her: Olive Chancellor, an older Bostonian besides dedicated to the feminist movement, and Basil Ransom, a conservative southern gentleman.

The Wings of the Dove: Set in London and Venice, this novel focuses on a sweet young American lady who develops a serious disease. What effect does her generous, brave spirit have on those around her? Do the people who environs her want to assist her or prey on her?

The Ambassadors : Lambert Strether is an American man in his 50s whose experience has been restricted mostly to 1 small-scale Massachusetts town and the elite social set with whom he socializes. When his rich fiancée demands that he go to Paris to persuade her grown son to return home to Woollett to run the family business organization, Strether takes on the task, realizing his success is a status of their union. However, when the insulated American gets a whiff of a more sophisticated European civilisation, what happens?

Henry James, Principal Stylist. Portrait by John Singer Sargent, some other great stylist.

Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus," 1883

This poem was written every bit role of a fundraiser to construct the pedestal for the new Statue of Liberty in 1883. Years afterwards, Lazarus's friend Georgina Schuyler campaigned to have the verse form put on the pedestal wall, where now it can exist institute. For many, the poem expresses the ideals of the American nation.

William Dean Howells. The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885; A Gamble of New Fortunes, 1890.

William Dean Howells*

As the longtime editor of The Atlantic Monthly magazine, an of import publisher of American fiction during this era, Howells's influence on American style was large. He lectured and wrote manufactures advocating realism in fiction, meaning that characters should have both bad and skilful qualities, merely like real people, and should come from the ranks of ordinary folks from the center and working classes. Plots should be neither all comic nor all tragic, and should feature probable, typical events, non extraordinary or fantastical ones. He followed his own rules in his own fiction.

The Ascent of Silas Lapham tells the story of a man of affairs in the paint business who becomes wealthy through his aggressive business practices, but loses information technology all through pride, developing a better character in the end. It also describes, with sensitivity, the difficulty experienced by the whole family unit in moving from their working class background to the civilisation of the rich in New York City. A Risk of New Fortunes follows a family unit's move from insular Boston to the livelier international city of New York, where the begetter, Basil March, goes to assume the editorship of a brand-new magazine. The story examines the social and economic bug in New York City at the terminate of the 19th century as the family unit slowly, advisedly explores the big metropolis.

Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", 1890

A tale of Ceremonious War daring and tragedy, and an examination into the marvels of the listen when pushed to extremity.

Mary Wilkins Freeman, A New England Nun and Other Stories, 1891

Though largely ignored in literary histories until recently, the bestselling writers of the American 19th century were women. Names like Fanny Fern and Due east.D.East.N. Southworth would accept been familiar to every Aureate Age American reader, only are almost unknown at present. The work of Mary Wilkins Freeman is i instance of women'south writing that is enjoying a resurgence of attention. If you sample some of her short stories, you will meet sympathetic women characters who struggle bravely for more independence and control of their own lives than 19th century society frequently immune them. (Clarification of "The Revolt of Mother" in this post.)

Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Daughter of the Streets, 1893; The Red Badge of Courage, 1895; and "The Open Boat," 1897.

Such a sad loss that one of the best writers American has known died early at age 28 of tuberculosis. Stephen Crane's clean, lean prose is characterized past irony and understatement and vivid imagery, which later inspired Modernists similar Hemingway. Crane'due south piece of work is too characterized by American Naturalism, a cluster of beliefs that interpret the human position in the universe as a difficult ane. For Naturalists, Nature is non a benign source of life and morality, merely a hostile, indifferent strength that outclasses people in its strength. Naturalists see people as driven past the environment and by unconscious, psychological forces. The storytelling that results from these premises is usually sad but powerful, and often vividly real.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets tells the story of the sad downwards path of a poor daughter from the Bowery. Thrown out of her home past her ii boozer parents afterwards she dates a friend of her brother'southward, bartender Pete, she loses her "graphic symbol" and must move in with him. He deserts her, and the story goes downhill from there—pitiful, but probably true for too many girls of that era. The Cherry-red Badge of Courage follows the path of Private Henry Fleming, a soldier in the Ceremonious War. He loses courage in the field of battle and flees; the novel is the tale of his search for redemption. It was much praised in its day for the realism of the battle scenes. "The Open Boat" (more than information in this post)  is the slightly fictionalized business relationship of an effect that actually happened to Crane, when he endured the aftermath of a shipwreck when he was on the manner to Republic of cuba to cover the Spanish American War for a paper. These plot summaries may audio somewhat depressing, just I encourage you to read one or all of these works anyway, besides every bit the keen story "The Blueish Hotel." Crane's writing is powerful and beautifully descriptive. The stories he tells provide unrivaled, realistic glimpses into the lives of some typical 19th century Americans. They also testify to Crane's conventionalities in man strength and nobility that may come up out just in the face of unbeatable odds.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper," 1892, and Herland, 1915.

Perkins Gilman was a strong feminist; "The Xanthous Wallpaper" is a protest against the social assumptions that women are kid-like beings who must be lovingly controlled by their husbands for their own good.  Herland is an interesting example of Speculative Fiction, in which she imagines an isolated world where a group of women take become able to reproduce without men, and live in a completely male-costless society. What happens when three men climb a range of mountains and come upon this isolated feminist society? Not surprisingly, Perkins Gilman thinks the women were getting along much amend without the men. Take a peek at this interesting work.

Edward Arlington Robinson, "Richard Corey," "Miniver Cheevey," and "Mr. Alluvion's Party," 1897.

Robinson could exist considered the first of America's 20th century poets, or the last of the 19th. His poetic forms are traditional, with recognizable stanza and rhyming patterns. His themes, however, are more Modernist, with his focus mostly on characters who feel alienated from their lives and times.

Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask," "Sympathy," and "Frederick Douglass," 1899.

Hailing from Dayton, Ohio, Paul Laurence Dunbar was a classmate of Wilbur Wright (the co-inventor of the aeroplane). Wright published a newspaper on black issues that Dunbar edited while notwithstanding in high school. Dunbar after became one of the first African American poets and novelists to gain national fame, with poems published in The New York Times, and poetry collections favorably reviewed in Harper's Weekly. Over the years, I have establish that today'due south students are securely moved by Dunbar'due south poesy, specially "We Wear the Mask," one of the poems students nearly oftentimes chose to write almost for class assignments. Clearly, Dunbar'southward themes are still very relevant.

Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour," 1894, "Desirée's Baby," 1893, The Enkindling, 1899

Kate Chopin

Pop for a while in her own time, Kate Chopin's writing became largely unknown until rescued by feminists seeking to uncover forgotten women writers from America'south past. Contemporary readers are the gainers, since her writing is very hitting and good, almost hypnotic to read. Many of her works, including The Enkindling, are set in late 19th century Louisiana, where she lived for 16 years with her husband, a Louisiana native. They capture beautifully the French lilt of Cajun speech, and movingly plead for greater scope for women than they were offered in nineteenth century society. I remember Chopin is one of America's truly bully writers who tends, still, to be underrated. The dazzler, poignancy, fifty-fifty sense of humor of her way is wholly her own. Try some of her work, and see for yourself.

Zitkala Sa, Impressions of an Indian Childhood, 1900

Also known as Gertrude Simmons, Zitkala Sa was a Native American Sioux whose mother had survived the Trail of Tears, finally settling in South Dakota. Simmons had a happy childhood, which she relates in this engaging memoir, until she was persuaded by Quaker missionaries at age eight to go with them to a boarding school they had founded for Native Americans in Wabash, Indiana in 1884. Eventually she became a teacher, a writer, a violinist, a speaker, and an activist on behalf of Native American causes. Her memoir is winsome, moving, and informative.

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 1900

Sister Carrie is the story of a small-town daughter who goes to seek her fortune in the big metropolis of Chicago. Her good looks, good humor, and not over-dainty morals help her to win her way to the superlative, ultimately condign a New York extra. On her mode upwardly, she doesn't hesitate to discard her lovers when they become liabilities or terminate moving up, simply Carrie always seems to land on her feet. Dreiser's novel is interesting for its motion-picture show of metropolis life in this era. Information technology likewise provides an example of American Naturalism or Social Darwinism, the idea that society is only some other aspect of primitive nature where the "law of the jungle" prevails. People must fight to survive, and only the fittest and most ruthless volition be able to.

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, 1901

As a slave who was a immature kid when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Booker T. Washington has an amazing story to tell well-nigh an of import part of American history: what happened to African Americans when they finally acquired freedom? Washington tells what life was similar every bit a slave, then describes his family'southward journey north to observe piece of work after Emancipation. He then details his struggle to find someone to teach him to read, and eventually how he became a teacher who went on to help establish Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to aid immature minority men acquire marketable trades.  Washington'southward views on civil rights seemed as well conciliatory to his critics such as W. E. B. Du Bois, since Washington advocated the importance of getting stable jobs earlier fighting for total civil rights, a view that was later superseded. That nevertheless, Washington was an important African American leader whose book witnesses what the struggle after Emancipation was similar for many African Americans.

West. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903

W. E. B. Du Bois was a scholar and professor of history and of other fields, and an activist who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He edited the arrangement's journal, The Crisis, from 1910 – 1934.  The Souls of Black Folk is a scholarly examination and a drove of essays on the social consciousness of African Americans at the get-go of the 20th century. The piece of work begins with these portentous lines, suggesting how relevant the work remains today: "Herein prevarication buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being blackness hither in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This significant is not without involvement to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour-line." Subsequently in Affiliate 1, Du Bois explains the feel of Blackness Americans as a feeling of "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one'southward self through the eyes of others. . ..  One e'er feels his twoness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, ii thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; 2 warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps information technology from existence torn asunder." Take a look at this important and seminal work.

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton, The Business firm of Mirth, 1905

Many of Edith Wharton's works chronicle the boxing for survival within the upper echelons of American lodge toward the end of the 19th century. Similar her fellow fictional character, Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Lily Bart has all the qualities needed to ascension to the top of the social heap past using her charm and dazzler to snag a rich husband. She begins the novel past maneuvering to do just that. But different Carrie, she has a couple of inconvenient qualities she just can't put aside: a moral sense, and a desire for true beloved. How volition these qualities serve within the heartless social system in which she desires to belong?

Willa Cather, O Pioneers! 1913

Just similar the characters in this novel, Willa Cather and her family settled on the bleak grasslands of Nevada when Cather was nine. O Pioneers! (which takes its championship from a poem by Walt Whitman) depicts the fortunes of the Swedish Bergson family who begin farming on the Nebraska frontier. The novel asks and answers the question, "What qualities are needed to make a successful pioneer?" pioneers being such an important type of American character. Not just does the novel answer this question, it asks and answers another: "What happens when those qualities belong to a adult female and not to any male members of the family?" This lyrical descriptive novel shows that not only environmental just as well social conditions can exist harsh when you lot step exterior of normal expectations. Withal with courage and vision, and the power to deport loss along the way, obstacles tin be overcome.

Links

Index to Archetype Literature Reading Lists

Go Back to American Romantic Era Reading List

Go Forward to American Modernist Literature Reading List

Related Post: Types of Literature in the Gilded Age

Photo Credits:

Biltmore Mansion.  By JcPollock (Self-published work past JcPollock) [GFDL, CC-By-SA-3.0  or CC Past-SA ii.v-two.0-i.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

Huckleberry Finn book cover. By E. Westward. Kemble (1861–1933) – illustrator [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Henry James. By John Singer Sargent (died 1925) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

William Dean Howells.  By Photographer unidentified (Google Books) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. By Published past Small, Maynard & company, Boston, 1898. (In This Our World) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Kate Chopin.   By Published by Minor, Maynard & visitor, Boston, 1898. (In This Our Globe) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

W. Eastward. B. Du Bois. See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Edith Wharton. Run into page for writer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Eatables.

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