This book places major literary works within the context of the topics that engaged a great number of American writers in the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression

• Topics include Civil War memory, the virtual re-enslavement of African-Americans after Reconstruction, and radical social movements
• Draws on a range of documents from magazine and newspaper accounts to government reports and important non-fiction
• Presents a contemporary history as writers might have understood it as they were writing, not as historians have...