SOURCE: “The Writers' Search for Reality,” in The Gilded Age:Revised and Enlarged Edition, edited by H. Wayne Morgan, Syracuse University Press, 1970, pp. 223-37.

In the following essay, Falk characterizes the Gilded Age as a time of great literary change, largely due to a break from Romanticism and a movement toward increased realism.

The serious writers of any age are in search of reality, the real thing, the genuine article valid for their time. What make the difference between literary movements and periods are the special historical characteristics of the age and the particular literary form which embodies that reality and contemporaneity. In the Gilded Age literature increasingly expressed a vision of reality in the novel form, as distinguished from the “romance” of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. The decades following 1865 were a blend of the old and the new. The older established writers of the mid-century—Longfellow, Whittier...