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It is very seldom in the history of literature that important developments take place without long preliminaries. From period to period new emphasis is placed on old ideas, and old forms are given the right of way in literary fashion. In the course of American literature, roughly speaking, the dominating forms of literature have been in succession: exposition and travel during the colonial period; poetry, satirical and epic, in the Revolutionary period; poetry in all its broader aspects during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. After the Civil War for fifty years fiction came to the front; from about 1900 on a new emphasis was given to the stage and the playwright; at present the most striking fact in world literature is the broadening and deepening of the poetic currents again. Yet all of these forms are always existent. To speak of the rise of fiction, in America then, is simply to acknowledge the increased attention which for a period it demanded.
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| Rise of American Fiction |
It is frequently said that America’s chief contribution to world literature has been the short story as developed since the Civil War. Yet in America the ground had been prepared for this development by many writers—among them, as already mentioned in this history, Washington Irving with “The Sketch Book” in 1819, Hawthorne with “Twice-Told Tales” in 1838, Poe with his various contributions to periodical literature in the 1840’s, Mark Twain with “The Jumping Frog” of 1867, Bret Harte with “The Luck of Roaring Camp” of 1870 and the great bulk of his subsequent contributions, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich with “Marjorie Daw” of 1873 and his other volumes of short stories. In the meanwhile the novel had had its consecutive history—from Brockden Brown beginning with 1798 to Cooper in 1820, William Gilmore Simms from, Hawthorne from 1850 on, Mrs. Stowe from 1852, and Holmes from 1861. And these writers of short and long fiction are only the outstanding story-tellers in America between the beginning of the century and the years just after the Civil War.
In a chapter such as this no exhaustive survey is possible, for it involves scores of writers and hundreds of books. The vital movement started with a fresh and vivid treatment of native American material, and it moved in a great sweeping curve from the West down past the Gulf up through the southeastern 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 expositors. The course of this newer provincial fiction is suggested by the mention of Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog” (1867, California), “The Luck of Roaring Camp” of Bret Harte (1870, California), G. W. Cable’s “Old Creole Days” (1879, Louisiana), “Nights with Uncle Remus,” by Joel Chandler Harris (1880, Georgia), “In the Tennessee Mountains,” by Charles Egbert Craddock (1884), “In old Virginia,” by Thomas Nelson Page (1887), “A New England Nun,” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1891), “Main-Travelled Roads,” by Hamlin Garland (1891, the Middle West), “Flute and Violin,” by James Lane Allen (1891, the Ohio valley).