Journalism and Realism: Rendering American Life (Medill Visions Of The American Press)

Both newspaper and magazine journalism in the nineteenth century fully participated in the development and emergence of American Realism in the arts, which attempted to accurately portray everyday life, especially in fiction. Magazines and newspapers provided the raw material for American Realism, but were also its early and vocal advocates. This symbiotic relationship reached its peak from 1890 to 1910, when writers who might be called the first literary journalists (or, much later, “new journalists”) closed the circle by more fully adopting the fiction writer’s style of attempting to “show the reader real life,” as their literary progeny Tom Wolfe would put it many years later. Journalism and Realism fills a much-needed gap in the scholarship of American Realism.

Thomas Connery is a professor of Communication and Journalism and former dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, the editor of A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism, the co-author of Writing Across the Media, and one of the founding editors of the scholarly journal Literary Journalism Studies.