<P> George Eliot's novel Middlemarch stands as a great milestone in the realist tradition . It is a primary example of nineteenth - century realism's role in the naturalization of the burgeoning capitalist marketplace . </P> <P> William Dean Howells was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States . His stories of 1850s Boston upper - crust life are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction . His most popular novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, depicts a man who falls from materialistic fortune by his own mistakes . Stephen Crane has also been recognized as illustrating important aspects of realism to American fiction in the stories Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Open Boat . </P> <P> Honoré de Balzac is often credited with pioneering a systematic realism in French literature, through the inclusion of specific detail and recurring characters . Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert, and Ivan Turgenev are regarded by many critics as representing the zenith of the realist style with their unadorned prose and attention to the details of everyday life . In German literature, 19th - century realism developed under the name of "Poetic Realism" or "Bourgeois Realism," and major figures include Theodor Fontane, Gustav Freytag, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, Adalbert Stifter, and Theodor Storm . Later "realist" writers included Benito Pérez Galdós, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, Machado de Assis, Bolesław Prus and, in a sense, Émile Zola, whose naturalism is often regarded as an offshoot of realism . </P> <Ul> <Li> Leopoldo Alas </Li> <Li> Louisa May Alcott </Li> <Li> Hans Christian Andersen </Li> <Li> Machado de Assis </Li> <Li> Jane Austen </Li> <Li> Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda </Li> <Li> Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer </Li> <Li> Elizabeth Barrett Browning </Li> <Li> Anne Brontë </Li> <Li> Charlotte Brontë </Li> <Li> Emily Brontë </Li> <Li> Georg Büchner </Li> <Li> Ivan Bunin </Li> <Li> Lord Byron </Li> <Li> Hall Caine </Li> <Li> Lewis Carroll </Li> <Li> Rosalía de Castro </Li> <Li> François - René de Chateaubriand </Li> <Li> Anton Chekhov </Li> <Li> Kate Chopin </Li> <Li> Samuel Taylor Coleridge </Li> <Li> James Fenimore Cooper </Li> <Li> Stephen Crane </Li> <Li> Eduard Douwes Dekker </Li> <Li> Emily Dickinson </Li> <Li> Charles Dickens </Li> <Li> Arthur Conan Doyle </Li> <Li> Alexandre Dumas, père (1802--1870) </Li> <Li> Paul Dunbar </Li> <Li> José Maria Eça de Queirós </Li> <Li> José Echegaray </Li> <Li> George Eliot </Li> <Li> Ralph Waldo Emerson </Li> <Li> Gustave Flaubert </Li> <Li> Margaret Fuller </Li> <Li> Elizabeth Gaskell </Li> <Li> Johann Wolfgang von Goethe </Li> <Li> Nikolai Gogol </Li> <Li> Manuel González Prada </Li> <Li> Juana Manuela Gorriti </Li> <Li> Brothers Grimm </Li> <Li> Henry Rider Haggard </Li> <Li> Ida Gräfin Hahn - Hahn (1805--1880) </Li> <Li> Thomas Hardy </Li> <Li> Francis Bret Harte </Li> <Li> Nathaniel Hawthorne </Li> <Li> Friedrich Hölderlin </Li> <Li> Heinrich Heine </Li> <Li> Victor Hugo </Li> <Li> Henrik Ibsen </Li> <Li> Washington Irving </Li> <Li> Henry James </Li> <Li> John Keats </Li> <Li> Rudyard Kipling </Li> <Li> Caroline Kirkland </Li> <Li> Jules Laforgue </Li> <Li> Giacomo Leopardi </Li> <Li> Mikhail Lermontov </Li> <Li> Stéphane Mallarmé </Li> <Li> Alessandro Manzoni </Li> <Li> José Martí </Li> <Li> Clorinda Matto de Turner </Li> <Li> Herman Melville </Li> <Li> Friedrich Nietzsche </Li> <Li> José María de Pereda </Li> <Li> Benito Pérez Galdós </Li> <Li> Marcel Proust </Li> <Li> Aleksandr Pushkin </Li> <Li> Fritz Reuter (1810--1874) </Li> <Li> Arthur Rimbaud </Li> <Li> John Ruskin </Li> <Li> George Sand (Amandine - Aurore - Lucile Dupin) </Li> <Li> Mary Shelley </Li> <Li> Percy Shelley </Li> <Li> Stendhal (Marie - Henri Beyle) </Li> <Li> Robert Louis Stevenson </Li> <Li> Bram Stoker </Li> <Li> Harriet Beecher Stowe </Li> <Li> Alfred, Lord Tennyson </Li> <Li> Henry David Thoreau </Li> <Li> Leo Tolstoy </Li> <Li> Ivan Turgenev </Li> <Li> Mark Twain </Li> <Li> Juan Valera y Alcalá - Galiano </Li> <Li> Paul Verlaine </Li> <Li> Jules Verne </Li> <Li> Lew Wallace </Li> <Li> H.G. Wells </Li> <Li> Walt Whitman </Li> <Li> Oscar Wilde </Li> <Li> William Wordsworth </Li> <Li> Émile Zola </Li> <Li> José Zorrilla </Li> </Ul>

Who was the leading realist novelist of the nineteenth century
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