ABSTRACT
The period from the American Civil War to the opening of the twentieth century has on the face of it an obvious unity. From every point of view the Civil War marked a turning-point in American history. America's literary culture between 1865 and 1900 is inevitably involved in the pattern of radical social change occurring between these dates. The links between literature and society are not always immediately obvious. Thus it took time for America's writers to recognize the kinds of change in their society which had been occurring with often bewildering speed since the close of the Civil War. In the literary culture of nineteenth-century America, realism, whatever its origins, became the chosen mode of those writers least willing to accept the social and economic order of the capitalist America of their time. And by 1900 just such a repudiation of the economic arrangements of the society that sustained them was the almost unanimous response of America's major writers.
