María Ruiz de Burton
1832-1895
Novelist
María Ruiz de Burton was the first Mexican-American author to publish in English. An aristocratic native of Mexico, she lived her adult life in the United States. Her novels, published under pseudonyms, blend sentimental romance with realism to explore cultural identity, and offer scathing critiques of racial, gender, and class prejudices.
Ruiz de Burton’s first novel, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), satirizes the hypocrisies of New England abolitionists. The Squatter and the Don (1885) uses the story of an ill-fated Latino-American romance to chronicle the displacement of California families caught between Spanish culture and a false promise of American capitalism.
In a letter to her friend, a commander and fellow rancher, Ruiz de Burton criticizes the Anglo-American attitude toward Mexican-Americans.
“The Americans are and will be always the mortal enemies of my race, of my Mexico. [And] I feel … a true hatred and contempt (as a good Mexican) for this certain Manifest Destiny.”
– Letter to Mariano Guadelupe Vallejo (1867)
Ruiz de Burton wrote The Squatter and the Don in the popular and familiar form of a sentimental romance but expressed ideas new to most of her readers–urging Spanish-speaking Californios to demand social justice from English-speaking “Americans.”
“Let us cry for the spilt milk, and remember how, and where, and why, we spilt it.
Much wisdom is learnt through tears, but none by forgetting our lessons.”
– Maria Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (1885)
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Mark Twain
1835-1910
Fiction Writer, Journalist
Mark Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River. The town supplied the setting for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The prolific Twain wrote in a dazzling array of formats: journalism, travel writing, short stories, novels, essays, speeches, lectures, and even a play and a children’s book.
A true original, Twain was among the first writers to use colloquial language, or everyday speech. He was a skilled humorist but also addressed serious subjects like slavery, which he viewed as an abomination. Indeed, as he matured, Twain’s writing took on an increasingly critical view of his fellow Americans. At the same time, he was a beloved national and international celebrity.
Samuel Clemens, a former steamboat pilot, derived his pen name, “Mark Twain,” from a nautical term used by sailors on the Mississippi River. “Mark twain” is short for “mark number two” or two fathoms (12 feet): the safe depth for a steamboat. The use of this name forever links the author with his early life on the Mississippi River.
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn transformed American prose style; it served as a declaration of independence from the genteel English novel tradition. Huckleberry Finn utilized a clean, crisp, no-nonsense, earthy, vernacular kind of writing that jumped off the printed page with unprecedented energy and immediacy; it was a book that talked. Huck’s voice combined with Twain’s satiric genius changed the shape of fiction in America.”
– Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English, Stanford University
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Kate Chopin
1850-1904
Fiction Writer
Kate Chopin dared to write about female sexuality, longing, and identity at a time when women were expected to focus on husbands and children. Raised in St. Louis, she moved to New Orleans to marry, later returning to her hometown to write novels and short stories.
Chopin’s works mostly take place in the New Orleans area and lyrically reflect the many cultures of the region: Creoles, Acadians, African-Americans, and others. Her first novel, At Fault (1890), went unnoticed, but her second, The Awakening (1899), caused a stir. In this sensitive and nuanced story, a woman strives to reconcile outward conformity and inward passion–and seeks to realize her potential beyond marriage.
Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, ignited a firestorm of criticism when it was published in 1899. Critics declared her account of a woman yearning for fulfillment to be morbid and vulgar. A Chicago Times Herald reviewer blasted it as “an overworked field of sex fiction.” The novel mostly disappeared until the 1950s, when it would be reclaimed by the Women’s Movement.
The Awakening‘s realistic narrative and psychological complexity anticipated such modernist novelists as William Faulkner and Edith Wharton. It is also an important early work in a literary southern tradition that would include Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.
After Chopin’s husband died, she moved her family back to her hometown of St. Louis. There, she began to write, becoming the city’s first professional woman author. Chopin also formed the city’s first literary salon. Every Thursday afternoon, noted artists, writers, journalists, and publishers gathered with Chopin to listen to music, perform, and engage in witty conversation. Her son Felix described the salon as “a liberal, almost pink-red group of intellectuals, people who believed in intellectual freedom and often expressed their independence by wearing eccentric clothing.”
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Charles W. Chesnutt
1858-1932
Fiction Writer
Charles W. Chesnutt explored nuances of African-American culture in the years after the Civil War. In short stories and novels, he acknowledged contradictions in racial identity, describing social hierarchies within the black community and delving into such controversial subjects as “passing” and miscegenation. He also pioneered the use of African-American dialect and folklore, most notably in his short-story collection The Conjure Woman (1899).
Scholar Werner Sollors once wrote that Chesnutt’s “complex narrative structures laid bare the tragic, comic, and tragicomic potential of the lives of slaves, former slaves, and their descendants and the ways in which white characters understood, or misunderstood, those lives.”
This illustration shows the climactic scene of the short story “The Wife of His Youth” (1898), which calls attention to the racial and class hierarchies within the African-American community.
Charles W. Chesnutt’s masterpiece, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), follows numerous characters in the buildup to a race riot, based on real events that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. With this novel, Chesnutt anticipates Ralph Ellison’s idea of invisibility and its potentially violent consequences.
“As man sows, so shall he reap. In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted. More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.”
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Abraham Cahan
1860-1951
Novelist, Editor, Columnist
Born in present-day Lithuania, Abraham Cahan chronicled the immigrant experience, the complex psychological journey of becoming American. His influential Jewish Daily Forward newspaper mixed shund (sensationalism) and literatur (seriousness) to educate new arrivals to the U.S., propagate socialism, and advocate for better living conditions in New York.
Cahan’s semi-autobiographical novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) follows its title character from Lithuania to New York City, from rags to riches–raising questions along the way about the personal cost of assimilation. Critic William Dean Howells championed Cahan “as a new star of realism” and compared his powerful portrayals of immigrant life to the work of Stephen Crane.
The title character in Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky achieves the “American Dream,” leaving behind poverty in his home country of Lithuania and becoming a successful owner of a clothing factory in New York City. Yet the end of the novel finds Levinsky lonely and disillusioned, feeling that his new life is hollow and unfulfilling.
“I saw that civilization was honeycombed with what Max Nordau called conventional lies, with sham ecstasy, sham sympathy, sham smiles, sham laughter.”
– Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917)
Cahan founded The Jewish Daily Forward in 1897, publishing in Yiddish, a German-Hebrew dialect spoken by many central and Eastern European Jews. It continues to be printed (in English) today.
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Edith Wharton
1862-1937
Novelist
Raised in elite New York Society, Edith Wharton summered in Newport and Europe. After publishing a best seller on interior design, she turned to writing novels about her world of privilege. With a keen eye for detail and a sharp use of satire, irony, and wit, Wharton crafted complex, realistic characters who struggle to navigate unhappy marriages, divorces, and double standards for women.
In The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton explores the social barriers and unrealistic expectations that restrain women. She became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for a novel.
Wharton moved to France in 1913. During World War I (1914-1918), she aided her adoptive country through relief work and front-line journalism. In gratitude, the French government awarded her the Legion of Honor. Here, she poses with two soldiers and her friend Walter Berry.
The Pulitzer Prize honors a book that “shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life.” Wharton was taken aback when The Age of Innocence won the prize in 1921. She felt that the prize committee missed the point of the novel, a biting satire of American society.
Wharton also lamented that, although Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street received the most votes, it was denied the prize because the book offended prominent Midwesterners. Wharton wrote to Lewis, “Disgust was added to despair [but] if two or three of us are gathered together, I believe we can still save Fiction in America.”
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Ida B. Wells
1862-1931
Journalist, Activist
A lifelong crusader for justice and a pioneering journalist, Ida B. Wells brought international attention to the issue of lynching: the murder of African-Americans by white vigilantes, typically in former slave states. She delivered lectures and wrote articles about the illegal practice, culminating with the publication of A Red Record in 1895.
Precise yet passionate, A Red Record is a masterwork of investigative journalism. To demonstrate the scope of the violence, Wells carefully compiled statistics from the Chicago Tribune and stories about specific incidents from southern newspapers. In other words, she used data and details reported by “white men,” not “colored men.” “Out of their own mouths shall the murderers be condemned,” as she wrote.
“The statistics as gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not been questioned, show that during these years [1863-1894] more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution. And yet, as evidence of the absolute impunity with which the white man dares to kill a Negro, the same record shows that during all these years, and for all these murders only three white men have been tried, convicted, and executed.”
– Ida B. Wells, A Red Record (1895)
“Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing power…. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity, and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves. Brave woman! You have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.”
– Frederick Douglass, preface to A Red Record (1895)
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Sophia Alice Callahan
1868-1894
Novelist
Sophia Alice Callahan’s Muscogee grandfather died during the Trail of Tears, the tribe’s forced displacement from their ancestral lands in the Southeast. His son, Callahan’s father, grew up to be a prominent member of the Muscogee community in Oklahoma and raised eight children with his Methodist wife. At age 23, Callahan became the first known Native American woman to publish a novel.
In Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891), Callahan drew upon her family’s experiences and Muscogee traditions to tell the story of a young woman who, like Callahan, is caught between Indian and white cultures, Christianity and Ghost Dance religion. Wynema is a plea for tolerance and for an end to injustice against Native Americans and women.
Wynema was published shortly after the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which more than 150 Lakota men, women, and children were killed. Callahan may have been thinking about this event in her dedication to the book:
“To the Indian Tribes of North America who have felt the wrongs and oppression of their pale-faced brothers, I lovingly dedicate this work, praying that it may serve to open the eyes and heart of the world to our afflictions and thus speedily issue into existence an era of good feeling and just dealing toward us and our more oppressed brothers.”
– Sophia Alice Callahan, dedication to Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891)
“Callahan takes on the role of a ‘woman word warrior,’ creating ‘strong-hearted,’ intelligent heroines and sensitive heroes who educate her audience about Muscogee culture, Indians’ and women’s rights, and the mutual respect between the sexes essential to happy marriages.”
– A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, introduction to Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1997 edition)
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
W.E.B. Du Bois
1868-1963
Sociologist, Essayist
William Edward Burghardt “W.E.B.” Du Bois was a leading voice in the fight for civil rights, a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois was also an advocate of Pan-Africanism, encouraging African colonies to fight for independence from European powers.
The first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, Du Bois was an academic activist. His collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), is a seminal work of sociology and African-American literature, brilliantly advocating for the full rights of African-Americans and vigorously denouncing the notion of biological white superiority. Black Reconstruction in America (1935) scathingly rebukes the theory that African-Americans were to blame for the failure of Reconstruction.
Du Bois served as the first editor of The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP. Under his leadership, the magazine promoted education and women’s rights, and featured such groundbreaking writers as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.
“This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… One ever feels his two-ness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
– W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
James Weldon Johnson
1871-1938
Poet, Novelist, Activist
James Weldon Johnson’s life defies neat summary. A leader of the cultural movement called the Harlem Renaissance, he authored fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including an autobiography. He wrote lyrics for many songs, including “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” popularly regarded as the African-American national anthem. He raised public awareness of lynching and fought Jim Crow laws through his activist work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Johnson was also a lawyer, diplomat, newspaperman, opera libretto translator, and university professor. If there is one unifying thread, it is this: in his words and deeds, Johnson conveyed absolute conviction in the limitless creative potential of black Americans.
In his anthologies, essays, poetry, and fiction, Johnson celebrated the artistry and diversity of African-American culture–most of it overlooked, misinterpreted, or dismissed by white culture. God’s Trombones (1927), the poetry collection many regard as his best, is written in the format of “folk sermons” delivered by “old-time Negro preachers.”
“In that great day,
People, in that great day,
God’s a-going to rain down fire.
God’s a-going to sit in the middle of the air
To judge the quick and the dead.”
– James Weldon Johnson, “The Judgement Day” (1927)
In 1930, Johnson stepped down as chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in order to devote more time to teaching and writing. Here, Johnson leads a class at Fisk University, where he joined the faculty of creative literature in 1931.
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Paul Laurence Dunbar
1872-1906
Poet
The son of former slaves, Paul Laurence Dunbar grew up in Dayton, Ohio. He began writing poetry in his teens. His first collection, Oak and Ivy (1893), attracted local attention, and his second, Majors and Minors (1896), won him national acclaim. In his short life, Dunbar authored twelve poetry collections, four short-story collections, four novels, essays, music lyrics, and a play.
Dunbar’s work painfully articulated what W.E.B Du Bois called the “twoness” of being black: torn between American-ness and African-ness. He wrote in two styles–standard English and African-American dialect–and condemned being forced to “wear the mask that grins and lies.”
Poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou took inspiration from the following Dunbar poem for the title of her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969):
“I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,–
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings–
I know why the caged bird sings!”
– Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy” (1899)
“[Paul Laurence Dunbar] was the first to rise to a height from which he could take a perspective view of his own race. He was the first to see objectively its humor, its superstitions, its shortcomings; the first to feel sympathetically its heart-wounds, its yearnings, its aspirations, and to voice them all in a purely literary form.”
– James Weldon Johnson, Book of American Poetry (1922)
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María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Jack London
1876-1916
Novelist
Jack London found salvation from an impoverished childhood at his local library. Forced to earn a living at age 14, London held a dizzying succession of jobs–sailor, “hobo,” gold prospector, socialist agitator–that would inspire a prolific outpouring of stories.
London’s work celebrates the will to survive extreme hardship, whether in the urban jungle or Arctic cold. For example, in The Call of the Wild (1903), a domesticated dog must rely on primordial instincts when thrust into the wilderness. London’s thrilling plots and unpretentious style made him a best-selling author in his day (he became a millionaire) and influenced younger writers like Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac.
London’s adventures included building a 45-foot yacht, christened the Snark, and sailing it from San Francisco across the South Pacific to Australia. London recounted the journey in The Cruise of the Snark (1911).
“Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible–if you care to see in print the things you write. (In this connection don’t do as I do, but do as I say.)…Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.”
– Jack London, “Getting into Print” (1903)
Jump to Featured Writers:
María Ruiz de Burton | Mark Twain | Kate Chopin | Charles W. Chesnutt | Abraham Cahan | Edith Wharton | Ida B. Wells | Sophia Alice Callahan | W.E.B. Du Bois | James Weldon Johnson | Paul Laurence Dunbar | Jack London | Mary Antin
Mary Antin
1881-1949
Autobiographer, Poet
At 13, Mary Antin left the Jewish settlement in Russia where she had spent her childhood and immigrated with her family to Boston, Massachusetts. She quickly mastered English and while still a teen began publishing poems in local papers.
Antin chronicled her remarkable story in the autobiography The Promised Land (1912), which credits opportunity and education as critical to her successful assimilation. Her optimism and conviction in the possibility of the “American Dream” made the book hugely popular in her time. It remains in print today, a landmark in the genre of immigrant narrative.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Antin in 1913, asking for permission to include her photograph in a book of “ideal Americans.” “You are an American in whom I so deeply believe,” he said, “that I should be sorry if I could not include your photograph.” The admiration was mutual. The previous year, Antin had campaigned in support of Roosevelt during his failed bid for the presidency.
“Although I have written a genuine personal memoir, I believe that its chief interest lies in the fact that it is illustrative of scores of unwritten lives. I am only one of many whose fate it has been to live a page of modern history. We are the strands of the cable that binds the Old World to the New. As the ships that brought us link the shores of Europe and America, so our lives span the bitter sea of racial differences and misunderstandings.”
– Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912)
