A、He mainly wrote about historical subjects such as the Civil War. B、His novels often contained elements of humor. C、He viewed h

The economic depression in the late-nineteenth-century United States contributed significantly to a growing movement in literature toward realism and naturalism. After the 1870’s, a number of important authors began to reject the romanticism that had prevailed immediately following the Civil War of 1861-1865 and turned instead to realism. Determined to portray life as it was, with loyalty to real life and accurate representation without any idealization, they studied local dialects, wrote stories which focused on life in specific regions of the country, and emphasized the true relationships between people. In doing so, they reflected broader trends in the society, such as industrialization, evolutionary theory which emphasized the effect of the environment on humans, and the influence of science.
    Realists such as Joel Chandler Harris and Ellen Glasgow depicted life in the South, Hamlin Garland described life on the Great Plains, and Sarah Orne Jewett wrote about everyday life in rural New England. Another realist, Bret Harte, achieved fame with stories that portrayed local life in the California mining camps.
    Samuel Clemens, who adopted the pen name Mark Twain, became the country’s most outstanding realist author, observing life around him with a humorous and skeptical eye. In his stories and novels. Twain drew on his own experiences and used dialect and common speech instead of literary language, touching off a major change in American prose style.
    Other writers became impatient even with realism. Pushing evolutionary theory to its limits, they wrote of a world in which a cruel and merciless environment determined human fate. These writers, called naturalists, often focused on economic hardship, studying people struggling with poverty, and other aspects of urban and industrial life. Naturalists brought to their writing a passion for direct and honest experience.
    Theodore Dreiser, the foremost naturalist writer, in novels such as Sister Carrie, grimly portrayed a dark world in which human beings were tossed about by forces beyond their understanding or control. Dreiser thought that writers should tell the truth about human affairs, not fabricate romance, and Sister Carrie, he said, was not intended as a piece of literary craftsmanship, but was a picture of conditions.
    20. According to the talk, what was a highly significant factor in the development of realist and naturalist literature?
    21. Why is Mark Twain considered as a very important literary figure?
    22. What can we learn about Theodore Dreiser, according to the talk?