A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 231

But his sense, most powerfully expressed in Huckleberry Finn, that the real could be

infused with romance, that it was possible to be true to the facts and to the ideal

possibilities of things – that had gone. And his eventual view of life could perhaps be

summed up by one other remark culled from what Twain called Puddn’head Wilson’s

Calendar: “We owe Adam a great debt. He first brought death into the world.”

Regionalism in the West and Midwest

Twain has been called a regionalist, because he was born and raised in the South,

lived for a while in the West, and wrote of both. This reflects a general tendency to

associate the term realist with those writing in or about the centers of power and the

term regionalist for those writing in or about the supposed periphery. Another term

commonly used to describe writing of the period like Twain’s, local color, reflects the

same tendency. Nevertheless, it is a fact that, during the later nineteenth century,

many American writers and readers became interested in the local or regional

folkways of the South, West, and rural New England and, often although not always,

about earlier times before the war. One reason for this was probably a reaction to the

increasing standardization of life, as more and more of American society approxi-

mated to an urban and industrial norm and a uniform culture. And another reason

for a related interest in older times was a particular instance of a general American

tendency to associate the past with innocence, a cultural equivalent of Eden. The

nostalgic utopianism that characterizes so many American cultural forms has

impelled numerous writers and artists to look back in longing, and to see some

moment in the national history as the time the nation crossed the threshold from

innocence to experience. In the first half of the nineteenth century, that moment as

typified by, say, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” was the Revolution; in the

twentieth century, it would be World War I, then later the Vietnam War, then later

still 9/11. And in the later half of the nineteenth century, unsurprisingly, the tendency

was to associate this version of the Fall with the Civil War. That tendency was

memorably illustrated by Henry James, when, looking back at the time of Hawthorne

and after, he declared in 1879: “The Civil War marks an era in the history of the

American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense ... of

the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future

more treacherous, success more difficult.” “The good American, in days to come,”

James added, “will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident

grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge.”

Among those writers who have been associated with the regionalist impulse was

one who worked as a journalist and editor with Mark Twain in the West, Francis Bret

Harte (1836–1902). Harte was born in Albany, New York, but moved to California

when he was 18, where he worked as a prospector, a teacher, and a Wells Fargo agent

before becoming a journalist. He became editor of The Californian and then, in

1868, of the Overland Monthly, in which he published the poems and stories that

made him famous. Many of the stories were collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp

and Other Stories (1870). The two most famous, the title story and “The Outcasts of

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