There were three writers who expressed their doubts and disbelief in the American optimism and progress. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Herman Melville (1810–1891) searched the darker aspects of human existence, the American past and nature. 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was born in Salem, Massachusetts to a prominent New England family. This is also a region where he set most of his stories. His fiction deals mainly with his Puritan heritage, on one hand, he was proud of his ancestors, yet he also felt guilt, especially because one of his forefathers John Hathorne was a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials. 

Though he became known for his stories, his most influential book was a romance The Scarlett Letter. The novel was published in 1850. The romance is set in a Puritan community and starts where all love stories usually end: When the love affair of Hester Prynne and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is over and Hester has an illegitimate child, Pearl. Hester rather wears the scarlet A (for adulteress) for years than reveal who is the father of her child. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, who arrives from Europe, tortures Arthur until he confesses his adultery before dying in Hester's arms. Hester is also often seen as an American version of Anna Karenina.

HERMAN MELVILLE was born into an eminent family claiming war heroes and wealthy merchants on 1 August 1819 in New York City, New York State. He had seven brothers and sisters. The father loved to tell his children sea-faring tales of terror and adventure, and of places far away. He died when Melville was twelve and the family moved to the village of Lansingburg, on the banks of the Hudson River. 

His most famous novel is Moby Dick in October (1851) was inspired by the epics of Homer, Chamoes and William Shakespeare. Melville’s captain Ahab pursues the whale and in one scene he talks to a skeleton of a whale, his black cabin boy Pip turns insane. Melville was also inspired by Shakespeare’s style. 

They sail on a ship Pequod, a company of people of all races, “a deportation from all the isles of the sea, all the ends of the earth.” „It is the ship of America: embarked on an enterprise that is a curious mixture of the mercantile and the moral, imperial conquest and (ir)religious crusade – and precariously balanced between the notions of community and freedom. [...] So, like the letter ‚A‘ in Hawthorne’s story, its determining characteristic is its indeterminacy. How it is seen as being and meaning, depends entirely on who is seeing it. “ (Gray 210–211).  

 REALISM

Realism reached a wide audience and was largely democratic. Realists try to represent life as it is, the characters speak in a colloquial language and act according to understandable motives, and the writer captures the manners and values of his time. The realist writer is not always concentrating on a specific region but often confronts characters of different race, gender, class, education, or environment. 

Realism stresses the common and ordinary everyday life. Individuals possess free will and if they are not idealizing life and society, they can decide rightly. Realists concentrate on common characters living ordinary lives and having the same, or at least, similar experience as the reader.

 The American Civil War, which caused great social changes, was not – with very few exceptions – directly reflected in the writing of that period. Henry James, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells did not actively fight. The best novel describing the war appeared only after thirty years. It was Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895). Within a few years, America developed the most progressive steel industry in the world and built the most extensive railroad system, connecting the East with the West. 

 The conflict between the South and the North was forgotten due to rapid industrialization and expansion to the West. One of the results was a rise in mass education and mass culture supported by the rapid development of magazines which gave the writers a new and much wider audience. The same stories thus could be distributed throughout the whole of America. American writers became concerned with common men and everyday life and they became dependent on their writing career. Literature was to describe life as it is. Realism introduced new settings, descriptions of typical characters and ways of life in particular American regions. The characters also often speak in colloquial language with idioms, which had appeared only occasionally and solely in dialogues. As the father of American realism, William Dean Howells remarked: “The arts must become democratic... and then we shall have the expression of America in art.”  

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837–1920) was the editor of influential American magazines Nation, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Monthly Magazine and Cosmopolitan. He is perhaps best known now for his novels The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and for his thoughtful, even passionate, defence of Realism in fiction. Howells opposed sentimental or idealistic narratives in favor of true depictions of daily life and the internal struggles of men and women.

BRET HARTE (1836–1932) is called “the writer of the West” as he laid the foundations of western. He moved to California when he was eighteen. He worked as a teacher and later as a journalist. He was a chief editor of Overland Monthly where he started publishing his stories and poems. He introduced new characters of outlaws, prostitutes and gamblers. Yet he is describing them as innocent, warm-hearted people, almost as heroes. His most famous collection is Outcasts of Poker Flat (1868). 

MARK TWAIN (1835–1910) grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway's famous statement that all of American literature comes from one great book, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The protagonist Huck has just been adopted by a respectable family when his father, in a drunken stupor, threatens to kill him. Fearing for his life, Huck escapes, feigning his own death. He is joined in his escape by another outcast, the slave Jim, whose owner, Miss Watson, is thinking of selling him down the river to the harsher slavery of the deep South. Huck and Jim float on a raft down the majestic Mississippi, but are sunk by a steamboat, separated, and later reunited. They go through many comical and dangerous shore adventures that show the variety, generosity, and sometimes cruel irrationality of society. In the end, it is discovered that Miss Watson has already freed Jim, and a respectable family is taking care of the wild boy Huck. But Huck grows impatient with civilized society and plans to escape to "the territories" -- Indian lands. The ending gives the reader the counter-version of the classic American success myth: the open road leading to the pristine wilderness, away from the morally corrupting influences of "civilization." James Fenimore Cooper's novels, Walt Whitman's hymns to the open road, William Faulkner's The Bear, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road are other literary examples.

WOMAN WRITERS  

KATE CHOPIN (1851-1904). Her most famous novel is The Awakening (1899), about a woman's doomed attempt to find her own identity through passion. A young married woman with two children and a tolerant and successful husband gives up family, money, respectability, and eventually her life in search of self-realization and love.

Often paired with The Awakening is the fine story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) by CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935). Both works were forgotten for a time but rediscovered by feminist literary critics late in the 20th century. In Gilman's story, a well-meaning doctor drives his wife mad by confining her in a room to “cure” her of nervous exhaustion. The imprisoned wife projects her entrapment onto the wallpaper, in the design of which she sees imprisoned women creeping behind bars.

MARY WILKINS FREEMAN, MAY LOUISA ALCOTT, EDITH WHARTON