Howells, William Dean

Howells, William Dean (1837–1920), novelist, editor, and proponent of literary realism.Born in Ohio, William Dean Howells wrote a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln and was U.S. consul in Venice (1861–1865) before moving to Boston, where in 1871 he became the first midwesterner to edit the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. He began his career in fiction with such studies of middle‐class married life as A Chance Acquaintance (1873) and A Foregone Conclusion (1875). Leaving the Atlantic Monthly in 1881, he increasingly shifted his professional focus to New York City, where he settled in 1891. Discovering in European realism an alternative to what he regarded as the prettified falsehoods of romanticism, he began a campaign to change American fiction. In his influential column in Harper's Monthly, The Editor's Study, (1886–1892), he defended a realism of “the simple, the natural, and the honest” and promoted novelists whose work embodied those principles.

Although often regarded by succeeding generations as timid, his 1880s novels opened new ground for literary representation. In A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Annie Kilburn (1888), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), he gave middle‐class readers portrayals of unscrupulous journalism and divorce, the travails of the nouveau riche in polite society, class divisions in a factory town, and social conflict in Gilded Age New York. Nearly alone among literary figures in condemning the 1887 Haymarket executions, he became more explicitly radical with his 1894 utopian novel, A Traveler from Altruria. Through his challenge in criticism and fiction to prevailing conventions, Howells, along with his friends Henry James and Samuel L. Clemens, redefined American literary standards after the Civil War.
See also Haymarket Affair; Literature: Civil War to World War I; Magazines; Socialism.

Bibliography

Kenneth Lynn , William Dean Howells, An American Life, 1971.
Daniel H. Borus , Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market, 1989.

Daniel H. Borus