Literary Realism / Naturalism

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  Ragged Dick and Risen from the Ranks

  In Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s most successful book, Alger codified the basic formula he would follow in nearly a hundred subsequent novels for boys: a…

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  Vandover and the Brute

  Written circa 1894-95 but published posthumously in 1914, Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute presents an unflinching portrait of unconventional sexuality, moral dissolution, and physical…

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  The Red Badge of Courage

  The story of a young soldier, Henry Fleming, who flees a Civil War battle, The Red Badge of Courage has been celebrated for its depiction…

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  The Cliff-Dwellers

  The Cliff-Dwellers was the first American realist novel to use the rapidly developing city of Chicago as its setting. Henry Blake Fuller’s depiction of social…

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  An Imperative Duty

  An Imperative Duty tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to…

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  Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

  First published in 1893, when Stephen Crane was only twenty-one years old, Maggie is the harrowing tale of a young woman’s fall into prostitution and…

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  Soldiers of Fortune

  A romance of America’s nascent imperial power, Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune recounts the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary,…

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  The House of Mirth

  One of Edith Wharton’s most accomplished social satires, this novel tells the story of the beautiful but impoverished New York socialite Lily Bart, whose refusal…

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  The Age of Innocence

  The Age of Innocence marks the pinnacle of Edith Wharton’s career as one of the finest American novelists of her era. The narrative follows Newland…