The genteel tradition, inspired by British essayists, thrived in the United States in the early twentieth century up until the 1930s. George Santayana coined the term in 1911 to describe a group of New England intellectuals who, through their essays, acted as cultural gatekeepers, defining the standards of moral behavior and the rules of good literature. This chapter traces a genealogy between European genteel essayists and their American counterparts, focusing particularly authors such as Charles S. Brooks, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Louise Imogen Guiney, Gail Hamilton, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Agnes Repplier, George William Curtis, Donald Grant Mitchell, and Charles Dudley Warner. Much of the genteel essayists’ privileged Anglo, upper-middle-class, Christian values and sought to defend "high culture" against its perceived enemies: industrialism, immigration, capitalism, and class polarization. The chapter closes with a presentation of Black genteel essayistic writing and reflects on how the genteel tradition should be understood today, as a more critical eye is turned toward writers of the past whose ideals do not align with contemporary social and political sensibilities.

Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century epitomized the social transformation happening throughout the United States at the time: an industrial revolution; transformation of technology, architecture, and infrastructure; population growth fueled by immigration; and the rise of organized labor and the growth of socialism and anarchism. Novelists writing about Chicago responded to these changes. Breaking with the “genteel tradition” that persisted in William Dean Howells’s “teacup realism” and Henry James’s aestheticism, Chicago realists represented the city with fierce irony, bleak plotlines, and frank language. Realists such as Henry Blake Fuller employed a wealth of metonymy that would better represent the new social conditions; realists such as Frank Norris employed a coarse style and melodramatic subject-matter that rejected the refinement of East Coast fiction. However, although Chicago novelists hinted at the violence in the heart of the bourgeoisie as well as the poor, their realism remained genteel in its focus on a middle-class, male individual and its reluctance to narrate the social upheavals of immigration, organized labor, and political radicalism.