The Real Champions of American Literature

Huckleberry Finn and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” illustrated the unique American experience by breaking from convention, focusing on the life of the common man, and emphasizing a newly discovered nationalist tone. Both authors extensively highlighted the settings of their stories. For example, “An Occurence at Owl Creek Begin begins by describing where Peyton Farquahar is saying: “A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below” (Bierce). Realism delved further into the environment of everyday life with the new incorporation of local color or regionalism. Regionalism is defined as “fiction and poetry that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region. This rich description establishes the character’s and place’s realistic nature and engages the reader.Twain wrote his characters in Huckleberry Finn using a rich vernacular to capture the ordinary speech of the Missouri backwoods along the Mississippi River. An example of occurs in chapter 5 when Jim says to Huck, “What’s de use er makin’ up de campfire to cook strawbries en sich truck? But you got a gun, hain’t you? Den we kin git sunfim better den strawbries” (Twain). Twain and Bierce use ordinary characters and objectively describe the events in the story. Life is described how it actually was. Farquhar and Huck are dynamic characters who serve a purpose in the plots. Since these works unfolded life as realistically and objectively as it actually was, American Literature of the 19th century spoke the truth.

Huckleberry Finn and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" represented the shifting face of literature as it responded to historical and social changes including the literary revolt against dominant Romantic genre, the focus on complex human psychology by those like Freud, and the idea that humans control their own destiny. Twain and Bierce’s writing argue that romantic ideals did...