Making Connections

American Literature 1865–1914

1. Regionalist literature, written by authors such as Bret Harte and Hamlin Garland, as well as women including Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary E. Wilkins, Sui Sin Far, and Constance Fenimore Woolson might have helped pave the way for the upsurge in the regionally focused literature of U.S. modernism. (See “American Literature between the Wars 1914–1945,” pages 1081–82.)
2. The transcontinental railroad, built with immigrant labor, is portrayed by Frank Norris as an “octopus” that threatened to decimate the “American” way of life. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of a few works of early literature that acknowledges how and why immigrant labor helped U.S. capitalists, the “captains of industry,” and corporations to make strides in the world of technology and industry. (See “American Literature, 1820–1865,” pages 970–71.)
3. The work of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois helped create a space for African Americans of later generations—particularly writers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Hughes, Larsen, Hurston—to speak about the distinctiveness of African American racial and ethnic experiences. (See “American Literature between the Wars, 1914–1945,” pages 1082–83.)