How did the civil war influence the being of American realism

The Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism with the Civil War. It is as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. Realist literature finds the drama and the tension beneath the ordinary surface of life. William Dean Howells, (genteel realism) a fearless and enthusiastic champion of the new school, felt that he must say what he observed and knew ("He ... can only write of what his fleshly eyes have seen," as Henry James says of him). The main theme of Henry James’ "The Art of Fiction" reveals his literary credo that representation of life should be the main object of the novel. And Mark Twain had, as his aim of writing, the soul, the life, and the speech of the people in mind