An indigenous literature was rising in the United States. Dickens had lived long enough to recognize the spirit of a new school in _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, and _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_, which appeared in 1868. Before 1890 the fame of their author, Bret Harte, was secure. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), too, had seen the native field and had exploited it. The New England school, Emerson and Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, lived into or through the eighties, but were less robust in their American flavor than their younger contemporaries who picked subjects from the border. _Tom Sawyer_, _Huckleberry Finn_, and the _Connecticut Yankee_ were life as well as art. Another writer of the generation, William Dean Howells, gave _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ to the world in 1885, and revealed a different stratum of the new society, while the vogue of _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ tells less of the life therein described than of the outlook of American readers. Pure literature was in 1890 turning more and more to American subjects; applied literature was searching for causes and explanations. The writings of Henry George, particularly his _Progress and Poverty_, brought him from obscurity to prominence in six years, and by 1885 had "formed a noteworthy epoch in the history of economic thought." The success of Bellamy's utopian romance proved the avidity of the reading public. Parkman and Bancroft, of the older generation, Henry Adams, McMaster, and Rhodes, of the younger, led the way through history to an understanding of American conditions. Economics, sociology, and government were beginning to have a literature of their own, the last receiving its strongest impulse from the thoughtful _American Commonwealth_ of James Bryce. In the field of periodical literature the rising American taste was supporting a wider range of magazines. The old and dignified _North American Review_ was still an arena for political discussion. During 1890 it printed an important interchange of views between William E. Gladstone and James G. Blaine, on the merits of a protective tariff. _Harper's Monthly_ and the _Atlantic_ had given employment to the leading men of letters since before the Civil War. _Leslie's_ and _Harper's Weeklies_ had added illustration to news, making their place during the sixties, while the _Independent_ held its own as the leading religious newspaper and the _Nation_ appeared as a journal of criticism. _Scribner's_ and the _Century_ had been added more recently to the list of monthlies, the latter running its great series of reminiscences of the battles and leaders of the Civil War and its life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay. Improvements in typography and illustration, combined with greater ease in collecting the news and distributing the product, made all the periodicals more nearly national.