Our next movement is Realism, a movement which started in France in the mid 19th century before spreading to other areas, including the United States in the 1870s. This movement was, in many ways, a reaction to Romanticism in that it rejected strange and, indeed, romantic tales and aimed to show society and humanity as it was in real life. Realists focused on events that were ordinary, usual and typical rather than extraordinary or exotic. Many writers of this movement were also involved with social change, and writing about real conditions of real people was seen as one way to educate the general public for the need for change. One of this movement's most easily recognizable names is Mark Twain, whose most famous stories were about everyday life in the American south, that is, the southeastern states of the US, and who worked throughout his life on a variety of social issues including ending slavery and giving workers more rights. Naturalism is an offshoot of Realism, and also had its roots in France. Both movements focused on the reality of everyday ordinary life, but Naturalism focused on how the outside world, that is, a person's environment, influences and, perhaps, determines that person's behavior. Naturalism generally believes that a person has a destiny or fate, and that person can do little to change that destiny or fate. Many writers in this movement focused on problems in society, like poverty. One of the movement's most famous writers, Jack London, wrote books which compared animal behavior to human behavior, showing that human behavior is not all that different from animal behavior in extreme circumstances. The next movement we are going to look at is Modernism, which, of course, stretches beyond literature into music and art. The movement itself started in Europe in the late 19th century, as with many of the other movements, spread to America shortly after. The tumultuous period ending in World War I and World War II were seen by many as proof that the modern world was horrific and chaotic, and the end of World War II was seen as the start of a new era of humanity, either for good or for bad. Modernism reflects these thoughts, and writers in the Modernist era were looking, generally, to look beyond the old, the traditional, and were trying to find meaning in a new world. If we have to choose one word to describe this movement, we would probably choose the word "progress". Modernists were concerned with finding out what doesn't work in the world and replacing it with what does. One major figure of the American branch of Modernism was Ezra Pound, who, among other things, revolutionized poetry.