ABSTRACT
American realism was hopeful because American life was hopeful. The economics of this happy America were coming to be regarded by vast numbers as a class economics, forecasting a less democratic future. Young men born in the early seventies were coming to intellectual maturity in a very different age; a new science and a consolidating economics were creating a somber temper that was eventually to produce in An American Tragedy. Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser were the intellectual children of the nineties, and their art was a reflection of that sober period of American disillusion. The intellectual backgrounds are prepared for a gloomier realism than Howells or Hamlin Garland's, realism that took its departure from postulates. The mind of the artist is susceptible to concrete social fact than to abstract physical principle, and the swift centralizing of economics in eighties and nineties provided the stimulus for extraordinary reversal of thought marked by contrast between Emerson and Dreiser.
