Epilogue

Abstract

In one respect, the sibling rivalry in American letters produced no clear victor. In 1861, despite its meteoric rise, journalists had not displaced authors as the nation’s designated truth-tellers. At the same time, the nation’s literary class had not turned readers away from journalism; indeed, the appetite for war news would drive interest in newspapers even higher over the next four years. Although they enjoyed numerous triumphs of their own, authors of the postbellum era bristled at the powerful presence of journalism, just as Poe and Thoreau had. In the decades that followed the Civil War, a new group of authors took up the question of how best to tell the truth in language. In novels and stories ranging from A Modern Instance to Sister Carrie, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Theodore Dreiser explored the role of commercial pressures, audience expectations, and other factors in shaping journalistic versions of reality.¹ Meanwhile, journalists ridiculed the attempts of authors such as Stephen Crane to do a reporter’s work. The rivalry raged on.