Local color

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Local color is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th century, particularly in magazine sketches published in The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. It was particularly attentive to the dialect and customs of regional cultures thought to be vanishing in the face of the modern corporation.

Sarah Orne Jewett was largely responsible for popularizing the form with her sketches of the fictional Maine fishing village, Dunnet Landing. Bret Harte shares the credit with creating and popularizing this style of writing, beginning with his 1865 story, The Luck of Roaring Camp. Other authors who incorporated local color in their works include: Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain, James Lane Allen, George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, and Mary Noailles Murfree.

The term has come to mean any device which implies a specific locus, whether it be geographical or temporal. Widely used in the theatre and especially on television, local color is often used derisively when a device becomes a cliché. In this sense, local color can be found in Shakespeare.