Writers of many types of works contributed to a great body of literature that flourished between the Civil War and 1914—literature of social revolt. Novels attacked the growing power of business and the growing corruption of government, and some novelists outlined utopias. Political corruption and inefficiency figured in Henry Adams’s novel Democracy (1880). Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) was both an indictment of the capitalistic system and an imaginative picturing of a utopia achieved by a collectivist society in the year 2000. Howells’s Traveler from Altruria (1894) pleaded for an equalitarian state in which the government regimented men’s lives. The year 1906 saw the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, first of many works by him that criticized U.S. economic and political life and urged socialism as the remedy.
After the Industrial Revolution, increasing numbers of people moved to cities. Men, women, and children began to work in factories, putting in long hours in difficult and dangerous conditions.
