Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Golden Age LiteratureThe diminishment of rural life at the hands of urbanization, for many, defines the years between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the twentieth century in the U. S. Traditional literary histories find this transformation clearly demarcated between rural tales stories set in the countryside, marked by attention to regional dialect and close knit communities and grittier novels and short stories that reflected the harsh realities of America's