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falling tree, and every lick makes agap in the crowd that lets in an acreof sunshine.”LOCAL COLORISTSLike frontier humor, local colorwriting has old roots but producedits best works longafter the Civil War. Obviously, manypre-war writers, from Henry DavidThoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorneto James Greenleaf Whittier andJames Russell Lowell, paint strikingportraits of specific Americanregions. What sets the coloristsapart is their self-conscious andexclusive interest in rendering agiven location, and their scrupulouslyfactual, realistic technique.Bret Harte (1836-1902) is rememberedas the author of adventurousstories such as “The Luck ofRoaring Camp” and “The Outcastsof Poker Flat,” set along the westernmining frontier. As the firstgreat success in the local coloristschool, Harte for a brief time wasperhaps the best-known writer inAmerica — such was the appeal ofhis romantic version of the gunslingingWest. Outwardly realistic,he was one of the first to introducelow-life characters — cunninggamblers, gaudy prostitutes, anduncouth robbers — into seriousliterary works. He got away with this(as had Charles Dickens in England,who greatly admired Harte’s work)by showing in the end that theseseeming derelicts really had heartsof gold.Several women writers are rememberedfor their fine depictionsSARAH ORNE JEWETTPhoto © The Bettmann Archive50of New England: Mary WilkinsFreeman (1852-1930), HarrietBeecher Stowe (1811-1896), andespecially Sarah Orne Jewett(1849-1909). Jewett’s originality,exact observation of her Mainecharacters and setting, and sensitivestyle are best seen in her finestory “The White Heron” in Countryof the Pointed Firs (1896). HarrietBeecher Stowe’s local color works,especially The Pearl of Orr’s Island(1862), depicting humble Mainefishing communities, greatly influencedJewett. Nineteenth-centurywomen writers formed their ownnetworks of moral support andinfluence, as their letters show.Women made up the major audiencefor fiction, and many womenwrote popular novels, poems, andhumorous pieces.All regions of the country celebratedthemselves in writing influencedby local color. Some of itincluded social protest, especiallytoward the end of the century,when social inequality and economichardship were particularly pressingissues. Racial injustice andinequality between the sexes appearin the works of southern writerssuch as George WashingtonCable (1844-1925) and Kate Chopin(1851-1904), whose powerful novelsset in Cajun/French Louisianatranscend the local color label.Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880)treats racial injustice with greatartistry; like Kate Chopin’s daringnovel The Awakening (1899), abouta woman’s doomed attempt to findher own identity through passion,