Upton Sinclair's 1906 book The Jungle, a masterpiece of social realism, exposed conditions in a Chicago meatpacking plant and led to the passage of laws governing the purity of food and to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.

Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), written in the same period as Margret Howth, tells of Jacobs's life in slavery and her escape from it.

"Life in the Iron Mills" (1861) was Davis's first major published work, and examines the appalling conditions workers endured in an iron mill in the mid-nineteenth century.

Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (1991), by Sharon M. Harris, surveys Davis's role in creating a new American genre.