The fourth volume of The Literary History of the United States covers the last third of the 19th century. - an extremely important period, a turning point in history, when an agricultural country, torn by internal contradictions and far from the problems of world politics, became a powerful industrial power in three or four decades, when the illusions of a special path for American democracy were replaced by claims to rule the globe, in literature a romantic movement gave way to the realistic. The volume “Literature 1865–1900” gives a general description of realism and naturalism in American prose, the development of poetry, drama, historical, philosophical and social journalism, mass literature and the utopian novel, and examines such phenomena as “local color” and the ethnic diversity of US literature. In separate chapters, the work of not only the world’s largest writers, such as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Henry James, or “minor classics”, such as E. Dickipsop, W. D. Howells, B. Hart, and Beers, S. Crane and F. Norris, but also other authors. The literary process is presented against the background of social and general cultural movements of the time as an integral part of the development of national consciousness.