High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The nature fakers controversy was an early 20th-century American literary debate highlighting the conflict between science and sentiment in popular nature writing. Following a period of growing interest in the natural world beginning in the late 19th century, a new literary movement, in which the natural world was depicted in a compassionate rather than realistic light, began to take shape. Works such as Ernest Thompson Seton`s Wild Animals I Have Known (1898) and William J. Long`s School of the Woods (1902) popularized this new genre and emphasized sympathetic and individualistic animal characters.