A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 233

west was, as they saw it, a natural consequence of human evolution and national

history, underwritten by both the idea of the survival of the fittest and the example

of earlier explorers and settlers. As Miller put it, in his poem about the “brave

Admiral,” “Columbus” (1897): “He gained a world, he gave that world / In grandest

lesson: ‘On! Sail on!’ ”

In the more settled farming regions of the Midwest, the writing tone, in both

poetry and prose, tended to be quieter, the narrative vision more narrowly focused

on the pieties of family and community. James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916), for

instance, achieved fame and wealth by writing a series of poems in the Hoosier

dialect of Indiana. The poems are light and sentimental, concentrating on pictur-

esque figures of pathos, like “Little Orphan Annie” (1883), or on the simple

satisfactions of hearth and home, and the rituals of farming life, as in his most

famous piece, “When the Frost is on the Punkin” (1883). “When the frost is on the

punkin and the fodder’s in the shock, / And you hear the kyouck and gubble of the

struttin’ turkey-cock,” the latter poem begins, “O it’s then’s the times a feller is

a-feelin’ at his best, / With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest.”

Like Riley, Edward Eggleston (1837–1902) was born in Indiana and achieved fame

by writing about the simplicity and community of Midwestern life and using the

local dialect. He chose fiction as his way of recording and celebrating his small

corner of America. But, as his most famous book, The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871),

shows, he was similarly inclined to domesticate and sentimentalize. Eggleston took

his cue, he said, from the French critic Hippolyte Taine, who insisted “the artist of

originality will work courageously with the materials he finds in his own environ-

ment.” And The Hoosier Schoolmaster, based on the experiences of his schoolteacher

brother, contains a grain of tough realism in its depiction of the coarseness and

bigotry of a group of Indiana farmers, who persecute the hero when a false

accusation of theft is made against him. But the tone of the narrative tends toward

the pious much of the time, and both the hero and the woman he eventually marries

are depicted as improbably ideal and impeccable.

African-American and Native American voices

The popularity of poetry and prose that observed regionalist conventions, or what

were seen as such at this time, such as the use of dialect, can be measured by the fact

that a number of African-American and Native American writers associated with

lands to the west attempted to write in this mode. The most notable of these were

the African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872–1906), who was born in

Ohio, and the Native American poet, journalist, and humorist Alexander Lawrence

Posey (1873–1908), who was born in Indian Territory and raised among the Creeks.

Dunbar wrote conventional verse, following the standard poetic conventions of the

time, but the work that gained him national fame was his poetry written in a stereo-

typical Negro dialect. Lyrics from Lowly Life (1896), the book that brought him to the

attention of the reading public, contains pieces like “A Corn-Song,” which offers a

dreamily elegiac portrait of life on the old plantation, and “When De Co’n Pone’s

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