It would be reasonable to assume that the years following the Civil War were a time of healing and rebuilding. And for the most part, that is what they were, albeit a very long and painful one. While the healing of the rift between North and South did make progress, all was not peaceful and the disharmony wasn't confined to the political arena. In literary circles too, the period was characterized by upheaval and turmoil. A literary civil war of sorts was raging between the camps of the Romantics and the Realists. Later, the Naturalists would join the fray as well. This was a battle waged over the ways fictional characters were presented in relation to their external world. Though the unrest might have been between schools of fiction, it had a very real basis. The battle reflected far-reaching social change that was planting the seeds of new discord- a conflict that would threaten to fragment the country; this time not along geographical borders, but along class lines.
Using plot and character development, a writer expressed his or her philosophy about how much control a man really had over his own destiny. Romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated what they saw as the ability of the human will to triumph over any adversity. Occupying the middle ground were authors like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, all of whom were influenced by the works of the early European Realists. It was their belief that people had only a limited capacity to determine the direction their lives took; that humanity's freedom of choice was constrained by the power of external forces. Diametrically opposed to the Romantic authors were the Naturalists - the likes of Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, who lined up on the side of Emile Zola and the Determinism movement. Their writings gave voice to the view that individuals have no choice whatsoever in what happens to them. It was their position that the path of one's life was dictated wholly by a conspiracy between hereditary factors and the external environment.
Socio-economic changes had a profound and decisive influence on this debate. The Industrial Revolution that took place at the end of the 19th century changed the United States in fundamental ways. In huge numbers, people migrated from rural homes seeking economic opportunities in urban environments. The plentiful supply of labor, combined with new machinery and processes being developed made conditions ripe for an economy focused on manufacturing. For the first time, there was an alternative to agriculture and commerce as a means of livelihood. At the same time, immigrants from all over the world flowed across the borders in pursuit of the same opportunities. In so doing, they added to the burgeoning labor pool, drove down costs and helped to push industrialization forward. Upon arriving in the cities and finding work, most of these migrants found themselves and their families at the mercy of unscrupulous businessmen who exploited them with brutal work schedules and coerced any who tried to resist, or in many cases, anyone who tried to escape. In the end, it was these sweeping economic and social changes and the pessimism they engendered that swung the balance of power in favor of the Realists and the Naturalsts.
Much of the literary product of the period had a distinctly regional character. This too could be traced to economic changes. The Industrial Revolution called for standardization, the mass production of goods, and streamlined channels of distribution. The lifestyle changes this rationalization of production entailed were profound and people began to fear that local traditions would fall by the wayside trampled in reckless pursuit of economic efficiency. Responding to these sentiments, Realist writers sought to capture and preserve the "local color" before it was lost. They drew upon the grim realities of everyday life in depicting the breakdown of traditional values and the deepening plight of the new urban underclass. This focus on the ordinary lives of ordinary people was characteristic of American Realism. Readers were attracted to the stories because they were something with which they could identify. American life was changing, the pace was quickening, and readers needed writers who dealt directly with the problems they were facing. In the great literary struggle the Romantic writers had been rendered irrelevant, vanquished by changing circumstances.
