Like all the terms relating to literary movements, the term is loose and somehow ambigous. American Realism began as a reaction to and a repudiation of Romanticism, with its stress on emotion, imagination, and the individual. The movement started as early as the 1830's but attained relevance and held sway from the end of the Civil War to around the end of the nineteenth century. The movement was focused in fiction, particularly the novel. It wanted fidelity to real life, or "actuality," in its portrait. The realist concerns himself with the here and now, centering his work in his own time, dealing with common-place everyday events and people, and with the socio-political climate of his day .