Week 8 introduces four major writers of realism.  The term "realism" what assume a wide range of meanings, but its original French intention to "tell the truth" remains a constant vein throughout its various manifestations. 

Mark Twain's national acclaim began with the publication of "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," what he called a "villainous backwoods sketch" recalled straight from the oral tradition and the nascent "local color movement" of the 1860's. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman helped strip away the charade of polite satisfaction of women locked into the manacles of horrific Victorian marriages.  A victim for a time of depression herself, in "The Yellow Wall-Paper," she exposes the abuse of the treatment of tormented women at the hands of male doctors in their misguided prescriptions. 

Stephen Crane, a journalist by trade, introduced the influences of environment on the development of human personalities and their various fates.  "Maggie, Girl of the Streets" records the debilitating effects and inhumanity associated with poverty, while his Red Badge of Courage replicated, for many veterans, the savagery of the American Civil War.

Henry James, a novelist of social manners, reveals the conflicting values and nuances that separate the American abroad from their European counterparts.  "Daisy Miller," a shallow American flirt, finds herself disdained by established European aristocrats and the subject of social vilification.

Mark Twain

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Stephen Crane