Literary Visions of the Poor

The “common people,” Walt Whitman observed in 1871, are too often “degraded, humiliated, made of no account.” American democracy must uplift “the specimens and vast collections of the ignorant, the credulous, the unfit and uncouth, the incapable, and the very low and poor.” Profound social change, according to Whitman, can promise new hope for American democracy, “with a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth.”

The development of American literary realism and naturalism often reflects the eclipse of Whitman’s hope for “general comfort” and “universal ownership of property.” ...