Which war did realism follow?

Realism followed the Civil War, which took place between 1861 and 1865.

Before the war, romanticism was very prominent in literature and focused very much on good against evil, normal men as heroes, ideal love, etc. Plots were intense, positive, imaginative and...not very real at all!

After the war America had begun to change, machines were built to manufacture things more easily, more immigrants arrived and work was plentiful. At this time there was a huge gap between rich and poor people, yet for the first-time working class people began to write books. This literature reflected their lives - not the made up flowery version, but their real lives.

So subjects of books began to depict a life of working a full time job, putting food on the table and coping with your day to day life as best you could. Basically, there was nothing at all romantic about it.

Established authors like Mark Twain, Henry James and Rebecca Harding Davis realised that this was the way to go, and they started to write real life stories, often with a regional dialect (Mark Twain especially is known for this).

So this was realism in it's earliest form. I wonder what they would think of us today with our abundance of reality shows? A step too far perhaps!