SOURCE: O'Brien, Edward J. “The Early Regionalists.” In The Advance of the American Short Story, pp. 151-75. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1923.

In the following essay, O'Brien provides an overview of major authors and major works of regional fiction in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

We have seen in our study of Bret Harte how largely his great popular success was due to the fact that he introduced to Eastern readers a new pioneer life full of color and romantically strange. It is not surprising that his success, together with the newly awakened national consciousness of our people after the Civil War, prompted many writers to seek the individual significance which life itself could not give them in differentiating place from place by local color, and in separating man from man by portraying quaintness and eccentricity. The desire may have been laudable, and the impulse was no...