For half a decade the Civil War gripped an entire nation as if with two clinched fists tearing in opposite directions. And as this painful laceration assiduously siphoned the lifeblood of America, it thus mechanically replenished forgotten hopes and ideals with a new set. After the war the nation emerged staggering, yet with newborn ideology as abundant as it was fervent, to be fostered and cultivated by all classes of society: politicians, reformists, radicals, peasants, scholars, and writers. Postbellum views, spawned from the spilled blood of the War, invoked didactic endeavors aimed at mass appeal, none greater than the literary movement of realism and naturalism. 

In literature, romanticism and idealism were buried alongside fallen soldiers and a new movement was born. This new literary movement sought to eclipse human heroism by elucidating intrinsic human deficiencies. Characteristics of this new form of fictional literature include simple plots that lack excessive imagery to reinforce reality, protagonists who struggle and ultimately succumb to society’s\world’s repression, and death, death, death! The definitive flaw of mankind is mortality, and what better way to reiterate this reality than by the relentless termination of literary protagonists?

It can be confidently noted that reverberations of the Civil War could not and would not be absent from postbellum fiction. What can be debated, however, is how, and to what extent, did the ripples of the once massive wave permeate American authors and drip as ink upon their pages of fiction.

Literary experts have conducted exhaustive research on the varying impact of the Civil War on postbellum authors and their sundry conclusions offer tremendous insight into the intricacies and originations of realism and naturalism. One such expert is John Limon, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Williams College, who wrote Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism. Limon concludes that, with few exceptions, realism literature failed to encapsulate the Civil War as a focal theme in fiction due to varied factors. One factor Limon proposes is that the very essence of realism literature demanded a disaffection from traditional romantic themes, such as war: “The strategy of realism was necessarily to find a way of defining itself as postbellum, while depreciating the importance of the war; it had to turn its incapacity for making more than allusions to the war into the condition of its newly achieved techniques for describing peace.” Describing peace, or more accurately peacetime, was obviously the preferred strategy for postbellum authors, but Limon does elucidate the War’s metonymic, if not literal, presence in realism literature - most prominently in William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes.

Daniel Aaron, Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Harvard University and founding president of the Library of America series of classic writings by American authors, is another expert who examined the treatment of the Civil War in postbellum fiction and published his findings in the 1973 work The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. Aaron’s critically acclaimed piece moreover sought to expose why the War failed to invoke literature of a more extraordinary and lasting caliber. One reason given is that gifted American writers of the time (most of whose fiction followed tenets of realism\naturalism) had an alleged indifference to the War – an indifference that inhibited deep resonation of the War into the writers’ consciousnesses. This notion is not, however, a universal truth as the Civil War did in fact resonate with numerous postbellum realism authors who dedicated whole works to the tragic struggle. Aaron, like Limon, evaluated each author individually because  infant views of the recent “national convulsion” were assured to be as diverse as the people who fought in it.