Literary History

The Two Faces of Urban America

Overview
The turn of the twentieth century brought rapid change in America. It was the industrial age. This era saw the emergence of two sharply divided classes: the business tycoons and the poor who provided cheap labor.

The poor were mostly European and Asian immigrants. They flocked to the major U.S. cities in search of work and found abject living and working conditions. The writers of this time reflected the wide gap between these two classes.

Edith Wharton and Henry James, two writers of the upper class, were Realists who wrote critically of the values espoused by those in upper-crust society. Throughout her life, Wharton remained close friends with Henry James, who was born into a rich family in Boston. Like Wharton, James felt that the upper class in the United States was too greedy and not as sophisticated as its European counterpart.

Along with the Realists were the Naturalists. Theodore Dreiser and Steven Crane were two great writers who emerged from this group. Both writers created female characters that came to big U.S. cities in search of opportunity and exciting adventure. In Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, he depicts a young girl in the slums of New York City. In Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the author portrays a country girl who comes to Chicago for better job opportunities. The city becomes a daunting challenge and a place to survive, not thrive.

The lives of immigrants portrayed in the novels of American Realists and Naturalists brought to light the challenges the poor faced during the Industrial Age. During this time, many people began a social reform movement to improve the lives of the working class. Those who wrote about these experiences were called reformers and muckrakers.

One well-known reformer was Jane Addams, whose neighborhood community house, called Hull House, became a place where people could find assistance, such as learning how to read. “Muckraker,” a term originated by Theodore Roosevelt, referred to people who liked to rake up crime and misdeeds, or muck, on others. The Jungle is a novel written by Upton Sinclair and exposes the extreme dangers workers faced in Chicago’s meatpacking district at the turn of the twentieth century. While Sinclair was not a journalist, his book did lead to the establishment of higher standards in the meatpacking industry.

Bibliography
Henry James and Edith Wharton Letters: 1990–1915. New York: Scriber, 1990. Read the correspondence between these two friends who led the Realist movement.

Collected Stories: 1891–1910. New York: Library of America, 2001. A collection of Edith Wharton’s short fiction during the Industrial Age.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Fiction. New York: Bantam Classics, 1986. Includes Steven Crane’s short story about a girl who experiences the harsh realities of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, and other short stories.

Sister Carrie. New York: Bantam Classics, 1982. Theodore Dreiser’s story of Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl who comes to the city at the turn of the twentieth century. This was a groundbreaking work of fiction when it was published in its honest portrayal of women. This is the unabridged edition, not the censored one initially published.

The Jungle. Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2003. Upton Sinclair published the full-length version of The Jungle in a series of articles. The book was published a year later, but the publisher edited out much of the ethnic flavor and horrifying details of the meatpacking industry from the original. Here is the original, full-length version of this famous work about the horrors of Chicago’s meatpacking industry at the turn of the twentieth century.

Web links
The Hypertext Edition of How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html
This hypertext edition reproduces the text and illustrations from photographer Jacob Riis’s 1890 work.

Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
http://wall.aa.uic.edu:62730/artifact/HullHouse.asp
Find out more about Jane Addams’s original Hull House. Includes a detailed timeline and photo essay about Jane Addams with a link to the urban experience in Chicago from 1889 to 1963.

Milestones in the History of Media and Politics
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/mediahistory.html
Here is a timeline of the events that shaped the media’s role in reporting politics, from the beginning of American history to “Yellow Journalism” and “muckraking” to the present.