American realism

American realism was a movement in art, music and literature that depicted contemporary social realities and the lives and everyday activities of ordinary people.

Whether a cultural portrayal or a scenic view of downtown New York City, American realist works attempted to define what was real.

From the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, the United States experienced huge 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.

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.

In Luks' painting Hester Street (1905), he shows children being entertained by a man with a toy while a woman and shopkeeper have a conversation in the background.

He also was a successful commercial illustrator, producing numerous drawings and watercolors for contemporary magazines that humorously portrayed New Yorkers in their daily lives.

John Sloan (1871–1951) was an early-20th-century Realist of the Ashcan school, whose concerns with American social conditions led him to join the Socialist Party in 1910.

He disliked the category of Ashcan school[5] and expressed his annoyance with art historians who identified him as a painter of the American Scene: "Some of us used to paint little rather sensitive comments about the life around us.

In both his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.

[8] In this manner, Henri influenced Hopper, as well as students George Bellows and Rockwell Kent, and motivated them to render realistic depictions of urban life.

Some artists in Henri's circle, including John Sloan, another teacher of Hopper, became members of the Eight, also known as the Ashcan school of American art.

Nordfeldt, Gertrude Käsebier, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, E. J. Bellocq, Philip Koch, David Hanna, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry Horatio Alger Jr. (1832–1899) 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.

[12] Stephen Crane (1871–1900), 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.

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.

Crane's earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist work.

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.

In the same essay, Hemingway stated that all American fiction comes from Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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 outworn conventions.

R. Watkins (1839–1901) was a 19th-century American writer and humorist best known for his memoir Co. Aytch, which recounts his life as a soldier in the Confederate States Army.

His accounts of battle make frequent reference to the dreadful screaming of shells, the awful horror of mutilated bodies, and the agonizing cries of the wounded.

[18] Other writers of this sort included Edward Eggleston, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Margaret Deland, Edith Wharton,[19] Ambrose Bierce, and J. D. Salinger.

Jacob August Riis (1849–1914), a Danish-American muckraker journalist, photographer, and social reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark.

Bland found England more rewarding than the United States and stayed there until 1890; either he stopped writing songs during this period or he was unable to find an English publisher.

White did not scorn writing for the popular stage—indeed he wrote a song for the pioneering African-American stage production Out of Bondage—but his principal output was for the parlor singer.