American realism was an early 20th-century idea in art, music and literature that showed through

these different types of work, reflections of the time period. Whether it was a cultural portrayal, or
a scenic view of downtown New York City, these images and works of literature, music and
painting depicted a contemporary view of what was happening; an attempt at defining what was
real. In America at the beginning of the 20th century a new generation of painters, writers and
journalists were coming of age. Many of the painters felt the influence of older American artists
such as Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Winslow
Homer, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Thomas Pollock Anshutz, and William Merritt Chase.
However they were interested in creating new and more urbane works that reflected city life and a
population that was more urban than rural in America as it entered the new century.
During the late 19th century, and into the 20th century artists and musicians contributed to the
idea of realism in the American setting. Each, though slightly different in concept or subject, was
defining what was going on in front of his or her eyes, without imagining a past or a future. While
it has been stated that American Realism was a Neoclassical movement borrowing from ancient
classical interpretations of art and architecture, this statement is false. American Realism was
actually the opposite; instead of reflecting back to antiquities, artists, writers and musicians were
concerned with recording the grit and the true reality of the early 20th century in America.
America in the early 20th century[edit]

The Ten American Painters in 1908. The 10 were Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, William Merritt
Chase, Robert Reid, Willard Metcalf, Frank Weston Benson, Edmund Charles Tarbell, Thomas
Wilmer Dewing, Joseph DeCamp, and Edward Simmons.
From the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, the United States experienced enormous industrial,
economic, social and cultural change. A continuous wave of European immigration and the rising
potential for international trade brought increasing growth and prosperity to America. Through art
and artistic expression (through all mediums including painting, literature and music), American
Realism attempted to portray the exhaustion and cultural exuberance of the figurative American
landscape and the life of ordinary Americans at home. Artists used the feelings, textures and
sounds of the city to influence the color, texture and look of their creative projects. Musicians
noticed the quick and fast paced nature of the early 20th century and responded with a fresh and
new tempo. Writers and authors told a new story about Americans; boys and girls real Americans
could have grown up with. Pulling away from fantasy and focusing on the now, American Realism
presented a new gateway and a breakthroughintroducing modernism, and what it means to be
in the present. The Ashcan School also known as The Eight and the group called Ten American
Painters created the core of the new American Modernism in the visual arts.
Ashcan School and The Eight[edit]
Main article: Ashcan School
The Ashcan School was a group of New York City artists who sought to capture the feel of turn-ofthe-20th-century New York City, through realistic portraits of everyday life. These artists were not
only depicting the rich and promising Fifth Avenue socialites, but the lower class richly and
culturally textured immigrants. One critic of the time did not like their choice of subjects, which
included alleys, tenements, slum dwellers, and in the case of John Sloan, taverns frequented by
the working class. They became known as the revolutionary black gang and apostles of ugliness.
[1]
Writers[edit]
Mark Twain[edit]
Samuel Clemens (18351910), better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the
Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Early 19th-century American writers tended
to be flowery, sentimental, or ostentatiouspartially because they were still trying to prove that
they could write as elegantly as the English. Ernest Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa, wrote
that many Romantics "wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were
never a part to a newer England that they were making... They did not use the words that people

have always used in speech, the words that survive in language." In the same essay, Hemingway
stated that all American fiction comes from Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn.[12][13] Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave
American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to
come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and
iconoclasm. For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not
merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions.
Twain is best known for his works Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Stephen Crane[edit]
Stephen Crane (18711900), born in Newark, New Jersey, had roots going back to the American
Revolutionary War era, soldiers, clergymen, sheriffs, judges, and farmers who had lived a century
earlier. Primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays, Crane saw life at its
rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His haunting Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage,
was published to great acclaim in 1895, but he barely had time to bask in the attention before he
died, at 28, having neglected his health. He has enjoyed continued success ever sinceas a
champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist. Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893), is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic American novel. It is the harrowing story
of a poor, sensitive young girl whose uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love, and
eager to escape her violent home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young
man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a
prostitute to survive, but soon commits suicide out of despair. Crane's earthy subject matter and
his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist work.[14]
William Dean Howells[edit]
William Dean Howells (18371920) wrote fiction and essays in the realist mode. His ideas about
realism in literature developed in parallel with his socialist attitudes. In his role as editor of the
Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine, and as the author of books such as A Modern Instance
and The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells exerted a strong opinion and was influential in
establishing his theories.[15][16]
Horatio Alger, Jr[edit]
Horatio Alger, Jr. (18321899) was a prolific 19th-century American author whose principal output
was formulaic rags-to-riches juvenile novels that followed the adventures of bootblacks,
newsboys, peddlers, buskers, and other impoverished children in their rise from humble
backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort. His novels, of which
Ragged Dick is a typical example, were hugely popular in their day.
Other writers[edit]
John Steinbeck
Frank Norris
Theodore Dreiser
Upton Sinclair
Jack London
Edith Wharton