Warner berthoff begins The Ferment of Realism (1965), his study of American literature from 1884 to 1919, with a succinct restatement of an idea long accepted by literary critics: “The great collective event in American letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the securing of ‘realism’ as the dominant standard of value.” This is the customary interpretation of the American literary generation that included William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James; indeed, these men viewed their own historical importance in much the same terms. Thus James, in his 1879 book on Hawthorne, condescended toward the “absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism which is now so much in fashion.” Twain's novels are laced with attacks, launched supposedly in the name of “realism,” against “romance” and the “romantic,” which is also the serious point behind the humor of such essays as “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.” And Howells, in the 1880s, emerged as the most overt American spokesman for the new standard of “realism.” “Let fiction cease to lie about life,” he demanded in Criticism and Fiction (1891); “let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires.” Twentieth-century literary historians have for the most part been content to accept and perpetuate these claims; they have told us again and again that in the works of our best fiction writers after the Civil War, American “romanticism” gave way to American “realism.”