It is not without significance that the new tendency gained mo mentum most rapidly in the new West. With the close of the Civil War the movement began with a fresh depiction of the American scene, and swept in a great cyclonic curve from the Pacific coast past the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, up through the South-eastern States into New England, across to the Middle West and back into the Ohio valley, until every part of the country was represented by its descriptive story-tellers. The course of this newer provincial fiction is suggested by such book titles as Mark Twain's Jumping Frog (California, 1867) ; Bret Haste's The Luck of Roaring Camp (California, 1871) ; G. W. Cable's Old Creole Days (Louisiana, 1879) ; Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (Georgia, 1880); Charles Egbert Craddock's (Mary N. Murfree) In the Tennessee Moun tains (1884) ; Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia (1887); Mary E. Wilkins's A New England Nun (1891) ; Hamlin Gar land's Main Traveled Roads (1891) ; James Lane Allen's Flute and Violin (1891).
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) was an insistent anti-sentimentalist and anti-traditionalist, and free from any dominating literary influence. His Innocents Abroad (1869) was an account of what he saw in Europe in contrast with what the American pseudo-aesthete was supposed to see. His Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) were written in honest contempt for the prevailing goody-goody boy story. The Gilded Age (1873), in collaboration with Charles Dudley War ner, was a relentless satire on the time, as was The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg a quarter of a century later. During the latter part of his life Mark Twain wavered between a relative faith in democracy—The Prince and the Pauper (1882), The Connecticut Yankee (1889), Joan of Arc (1896) and a positive despair in humankind—What is Man? ( I906) The Mysterious Stranger (1916) and other posthumous works.
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was the only American to rival Mark Twain in the long period when they were contempo raries and friends. Howells's career falls into two clearly marked periods before and after he had come under the acknowledged influence of Tolstoi. A trained observer in the school of journal ism, he was content in the first period to focus his attention on the interplay of contrasting cultures, Western and Eastern, American and European, as in A Foregone Conclusion (1875). The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884) and Indian Summer (1886). But when, through Tolstoi, he "began at last to discover [his] relations to the race," his novels, while retaining their earlier charm, carried on their shoul ders the Pilgrim's pack of a social burden, as in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), The Quality of Mercy (1892), The World of Chance (1893), A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and many another. He was extremely prolific, though scrupulous in his art ; and he exerted a wide influence over the oncoming generation.
Henry James (1843-1916) furnishes an inevitable parallel to Howells. Throughout his authorship he followed the path of the
psychological realist from which Howells was diverted in mid career. In this pursuit he penetrated to the inner shrines of sophisticated life: The American (1877) presents a robust com patriot cruelly wronged by an alien society. Later, American society had become alien to James. The writing of Washington Square (i881) a purely American narration, made him "feel acutely the want of the 'paraphernalia,' " of a matured society. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) he built "large, in fine embossed vaults and painted arches" which were for the most part located in Europe. The Tragic Muse (1890), one of his simplest works, portrays the security of conservative England threatened by an invasion from the Bohemia of art. From this point on James can hardly be claimed as American. And from this point too both his thinking processes and his style became so involved as to demand the loyal and painstaking attention of a highly eclectic body of readers.
In the 188o's, the decade in which Howells learned from his Russian master to "set life forever above art" the output of American fiction had become abundant and varied. The senti mental domestic story, the romance of adventure, the historical tale, the international novel, the provincial picture and the pur pose novel all flourished. From them all only a few survive in memory, and these with such religious or ethical thesis as Lew Wallace's Ben Hur (188o), Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884), Margaret Deland's John Ward, Preacher (1888) and Edward Bel lamy's Looking Backward (1888). Of the novelists who emerged at this time into a popularity not without literary basis the chief was Francis R. Stockton (1834-1902), a lord of whimsical mis rule in his day, and F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909), prolific author of romances located in Europe and the Near East.
The current of romance, of course, did not cease to flow, but from 1890 to 1910 the most marked tendency in American fiction was toward the ethical realism of Tolstoi or the naturalism of Zola. With the outbreak of the brief war with Spain in 1898 an awakened national self-consciousness recognized or inspired such historical novels as Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker (1897), Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898), Mary John ston's To Have and to Hold (1900), Winston Churchill's Richard Carvel (1899) and Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith (1899). More important than this were the social novels reflective of Howells's later period written by Hamlin Garland, Brand Whit lock, Winston Churchill and Thomas Nelson Page, and still more important was the fresh naturalism of Stephen Crane (1871-190o) in Maggie (1896), George's Mother (1896) and the extraordi nary expressionism of The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and The Open Boat (1898). With Frank Norris (187o-19o2) the new century was greeted in another succession of naturalistic stories of which the two members, The Octopus 0900 and The Pit (1903), of the incompleted trilogy, The Epic of the Wheat, are the most important.