The history of American women's domestic fiction in the second half of the twentieth century describes a movement from a handful of exemplary careers to a panoply of practitioners. The 1950s are typified by a few stellar careers – Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Spencer, and Shirley Jackson – a trend that continues into the 1960s with Joyce Carol Oates among others – but as the decade evolves we find the number of realist writers growing at a pace unprecedented since the beginning of the century. In fact, a closer examination of the history of the period suggests that the conventional analogies concerning gender between nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary production in the USA are not really as neat as we often assume. For the rise of new modern domestic novelists (as opposed to sentimental writers and romancers) is one of the least-appreciated stories comprising twentieth-century American literary history. These writers were rendered invisible in the critical accounts, except for some passing nod to one or another of them, often as niche authors – southern gothicists, like Flannery O’Connor; nasty or charming satirists, like Mary McCarthy; or regionalists, like Eudora Welty. Such attribution may have suited the needs of literary historians intent on promoting war novelists, existentialists, or master comedians and tragedians of manners. Untold, however, is the story of how these women writers more and more often turn their attention to contemporary mores, history, and politics as the scene of their fiction.