In American literature,the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end.The Age of Realism came into existence.It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism.Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary,a slice of life as it is really lived.It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low,and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.
Mark Twain,William Dean Howells,Henry James