Along with the death of innocence occasioned by what was then heartbreakingly referred to as the War to End All Wars, the gentility of American fiction passed out of fashion by the 1920s. Those elegant writers of elegant stories like Henry James and Edith Wharton were either dead or on their way to being out ...
Realism was a literary movement directly opposed to the previous movement of Romanticism. The Romantics believed in following one’s heart or gut to lead to life’s truths, particularly in using Nature as the catalyst. For example, Melville’s Moby Dick is an escape novel; Ishmael escapes from the confining environment of Manhattan to go to the ...
During America’s formative years, the literature produced by its inhabitants was not perceived as that which would initiate a unique literary tradition. Europeans not only dismissed the story-telling of Native Americans and African-Americans as unworthy of the title ‘literature,’ but also deemed the writing by European immigrants and descendants a mere continuation of literary trends ...
American author Mark Twain was called the “Father of American Literature” by William Faulkner and it was a title well deserved. With classic tales like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain set the standard for childhood adventure. Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in Florida, ...