The novel gained unprecedented prestige in the age of realism. The chief ground of opposition to the upstart form had largely been contained by mid-century – moralistic alarm at its alleged powers of seduction. But only after 1865 did the dream of “the great American novel” displace the dream of a national epic. Fiction, declared William Dean Howells at century's end, had become “the chief intellectual stimulus of our time, whether we like the fact or not.” “To-day is the day of the novel,” Frank Norris agreed. Posterity has confirmed the verdict. No span of US literary history before or since has been defined so predominantly in terms of its prose fiction.

Fiction theory lagged behind practice. In 1884, Henry James could call “The Art of Fiction” an almost untouched topic. “Only a short time ago,” in the days of Dickens and Thackeray, the English novel “had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it,” as if “a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding,” and “our only business with it could be to swallow it.” The situation soon improved considerably. Important American writers published such notable critical books as Howells's Criticism and Fiction (1891), Hamlin Garland's Crumbling Idols (1894), and Edith Wharton's The Art of Fiction (1925). James raised the genre of the authorial preface to a plane of unequaled sophistication. Close reading reached its first maturity between James's Hawthorne (1879) and William Crary Brownell's American Prose Masters (1909). The first histories of American literature date from the postbellum period, the first critical handbooks from the early twentieth century.