The Rise of Realism

Civil War watershed in American history

Innocent optimism X exhaustion
Idealist X self-made man
Darwins survival of the fittest transposed
to business
Post-war business boom prestige to the
north
Natural resources enhance business
The train, the telegraph, the immigrants

Country X City leading to urban problems

Labor unions implications
Farmers and their problems
Millionaires from 100 (1860) to 1,000 in
15 years
1860 A young agricultural ex-colony
1914 A huge, modern industrial nation
The richest country in the world in 1914
Population: from 31 to 76 million
Industrialization brings about alienation a
leap towards individuality

MARK TWAIN (1835 1910)

Real name: Samuel Clemens

Born in Hannibal, Missouri
Hemingway: American literature
begins with Huckleberry Finn
A story of death, rebirth and initiation
Ideal of harmonious community: What
you want on a raft is for everybody to
be satisfied and feel right and kind
toward the others." The raft is sunk by
a steamboat (progress)

The unstable relationship between reality

and illusion is Twain's characteristic theme,
the basis of much of his humor. The
magnificent
yet
deceptive,
constantly
changing river is also the main feature of
his imaginative landscape. In Life on the
Mississippi, Twain recalls his training as a
young steamboat pilot when he writes: "I
went to work now to learn the shape of the
river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable
objects that ever I tried to get mind or
hands on, that was the chief."

Twain's moral sense as a writer echoes

his pilot's responsibility to steer the
ship to safety. Samuel Clemens's pen
name, "Mark Twain," is the phrase
Mississippi boatmen used to signify
two fathoms (3.6 meters) of water, the
depth needed for a boat's safe
passage. Twain's serious purpose,
combined with a rare genius for
humor and style, keep his writing
fresh and appealing.

Two major literary currents in 19th-century

America merged in Mark Twain: popular frontier
humor and local color, or "regionalism." These
related literary approaches began in the 1830s -and had even earlier roots in local oral traditions. In
ragged frontier villages, on riverboats, in mining
camps, and around cowboy campfires far from city
amusements, storytelling flourished. Exaggeration,
tall tales, incredible boasts, and comic workingmen
heroes enlivened frontier literature. These
humorous forms were found in many frontier
regions -- in the "old Southwest" (the present-day
inland South and the lower Midwest), the mining
frontier, and the Pacific Coast.

Each region had its colorful characters

around whom stories collected: Mike Fink,
the Mississippi riverboat brawler; Casey
Jones, the brave railroad engineer; John
Henry, the steel-driving African-American;
Paul Bunyan, the giant logger whose fame
was helped along by advertising; westerners
Kit Carson, the Indian fighter, and Davy
Crockett, the scout. Their exploits were
exaggerated and enhanced in ballads,
newspapers, and magazines. Sometimes, as
with Kit Carson and Davy Crockett, these
stories were strung together into book
form.

Twain, Faulkner, and many other writers,

particularly southerners, are indebted to
frontier pre-Civil War humorists such as
Johnson Hooper, George Washington Harris,
Augustus Longstreet, Thomas Bangs
Thorpe, and Joseph Baldwin. From them and
the American frontier folk came the wild
proliferation of comical new American
words: "absquatulate" (leave),
"flabbergasted" (amazed), "rampagious"
(unruly, rampaging). Local boasters, or
"ring-tailed roarers," who asserted they
were half horse, half alligator, also
underscored the boundless energy of the
frontier.

They drew strength from natural

hazards that would terrify lesser men.
"I'm a regular tornado," one swelled,
"tough as hickory and long-winded as
a nor'wester. I can strike a blow like a
falling tree, and every lick makes a
gap in the crowd that lets in an acre of
sunshine."