'List with Tearful Eye': Mark Twain's Early Battles for Realism against Sentimental Fiction.

This article examines Mark Twain's early literary efforts to challenge the prevalent sentimental fiction of his time by promoting realism, focusing on lesser-known sketches and stories from the 1860s and 1870s. Twain satirizes various forms of sentimental writing—including love fiction, war romances, advice columns, and human-interest news—using humor, irony, and hyperbole to expose their unrealistic emotional appeals and to contrast them with the harsher realities of life, war, and human behavior. The article highlights Twain's critique of sentimental tropes involving love, war glory, widows, orphans, old age, and animals, showing how he often portrayed women and marginalized figures as strong and pragmatic rather than idealized or passive. It also discusses Twain's use of emerging technologies, such as the telephone, to symbolize the clash between outdated sentimentalism and modern realism. Overall, the piece situates these early works as foundational in Twain's development of a realist literary vision that sought to replace the excessive emotionalism of Romantic sentimentalism with more objective and nuanced portrayals of human experience.