"Huckleberry Finn"
            
             The way in which a young boy loses his innocence by realizing the truth in life symbolizes how the evolution of Transcendentalism to Realism destroys a nation, as the United States moves towards the Civil War. American transcendentalism began with the formation of the Transcendental Club in Boston, in 1836. Transcendentalists were influenced by romanticism, especially such aspects as self-examination, the celebration of individualism, and the extolling of the beauties of nature and humankind. As it spread throughout the country, the people lived in complete harmony, with themselves and among themselves, in a fantastic world. American Romanticism was followed by Dark Romanticism, in which Nathaniel Hawthorne is its most symbolic character. Realism was then introduced to American literature. It encompassed the time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction "accurately !
             representing the American Lives in various contexts."1 The Realism, which was a major cause of the American Civil War, can be defined as "the faithful representation of reality."2 Mark Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn symbolizes the loss of a nation as the United States moved towards the Civil War.
             American Romanticism or Transcendentalism is an essential movement in the American history and literature. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "essential idealist of the movement, transcendentalism becomes a union of solipsism, thought to be self, and materialism, under which the only verifiable reality is the quantifiable external world of objects and sense data."3 Transcendentalism, highly influenced by English Romanticism and by Neoplatonism, "is a belief in a higher reality than that found in sense experience or in a higher kind of knowledge than that achieved by human reason."4 During this per...