ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the American literature dealt with the challenges of the period including the First World War and the stock market crash. It examines key writer of the time Hamlin Garland, providing a rich and varied literature that reflects these turbulent years. From the outset of his literary career in the 1880s, Garland was a single-minded adherent of the school of realism in American fiction of which Howells was the pioneer. Just as Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott had once conceived of their novels as spreading greater understanding of the Irish and Scots among English readers, so in the aftermath of the Civil War, American local colour writers tried to explore and explain the characteristics of the different sections of America for the benefit of the population as a whole. Howell cannot find a narrative form and structure that is appropriate to what is new and radical in his imaginative insight into American rural experience.
