SOURCE: Falk, Robert P. “The Rise of Realism 1871-1891.” In Transitions in American Literary History, edited by Harry Hayden Clark, pp. 381-442. New York: Octagon Books, 1967.

In the following essay, originally published in 1954, Falk traces the emergence of the realist aesthetic from the end of the Civil War to the 1890s.

I

Following the Civil War, in the late 1860's, the twilight of romantic idealism became fused with early indications of a new and different literary and intellectual atmosphere. During the seventies and eighties the new tendencies slowly coalesced into a complex relationship of philosophical ideas, critical principles, and literary methods until, after 1886, Howells became spokesman for an aesthetic of American realism in the Editor's Study of Harper's Magazine. Between the publication of The Hoosier Schoolmaster in 1871 and the appearance of Criticism and Fiction in 1891 the earlier realism passed from a negative phase of reaction through a middle...