Beginning of Essay
American people and the authors among them were left disillusioned by the effects that World War I had on their society. America needed a literature that would explain what had happened and what was happening to their society. American writers turned to what is no ....

Middle of Essay
.... walks of life. They did not try to give one view of life but instead attempted to show the different classes, manners, and stratification of life in America. Realists created this picture of America by combining a wide variety of “details derived from observation and documentation” to “approach the norm of experience” (Elliot 503). Along with this technique, realists compared the “objective or absolute existence” in America to that of the “universal truths, or observed facts of life” (Harvey 12). In other words, realists objectively looked at American society and pointed out the aspects that it had in common with the general truths o ....