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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
American classical realists in the period 1865–1900 sought, in one way or another, to grasp the essence of their new concern and method. William Dean Howells defined it as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” Mark Twain claimed in the preface to his first book, “I am sure I have written honestly, whether wisely or not,” whereas Henry James (in The Art of Fiction, 1884) enjoined the aspiring writer not to “think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the color of life itself.” Truth, honesty, faithfulness to the “color of life itself”—what serious writer, in any period and writing in any mode, is not committed to those things? The problem, of course, lies in what we mean by each term, where the “material” and the “color of life” are, and by what standards (and by whom) they are to be validated. The resolution of those questions is a version of cultural politics.
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