SOURCE: Graham, Mary. “The Protests of Writers and Thinkers.” In The Rhetoric of Protest and Reform, 1878-1898, edited by Paul H. Boase, pp. 295-319. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980.

In the following essay, Graham characterizes four writers—Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, Edward Bellamy, and Henry George—as spokesmen for social reform in late nineteenth-century America.

Politicians, literary figures, and reformers thronged to the lecture platform during the decade before and the decade after the American Civil War. Lyceums and library associations provided the audiences—and a supplementary income for many of the great and near-great. When the development of the railroads made it possible by 1858 to visit Chicago from New York without changing trains, almost three hundred lecturers advertised their willingness—even their eagerness—to spread before midwestern audiences their moralistic and cultural interests.

The Civil War brought a halt to such activities. Not long after the end...