Howells, William Dean

Howells, William Dean (1837–1920), born in Ohio, began at the age of nine to set type in his father's printing office. As he tells in My Year in a Log Cabin (1893) and The Country Printer in Impressions and Experiences (1896), his formal education was very slight and he had to school himself in the pressroom and from his father's bookcase. The family life in Hamilton, one of several Ohio towns to which they migrated, is revealed in the autobiographical A Boy's Town (1890). After many moves, the family settled in Columbus, where from 1856 to 1861 Howells wrote for the Ohio State Journal, and with J.J. Piatt⧫ published the Poems of Two Friends (1860). Meanwhile he was passionately studying languages and reading what literature he could obtain, activities which in later life he described in such volumes as My Literary Passions (1895), Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), Years of My Youth (1916), and others.

In 1860 he wrote a campaign biography of Lincoln, which won him the consulate at Venice. During his four years there he found time to write a pleasant observation of Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867), and his study of the language and literature later bore fruit in Modern Italian Poets (1887). Returning to America (1865), he was associated briefly with The Nation, and then accepted the subeditorship of the Atlantic Monthly, a post he held for five years, until he became editor in chief (1871–81). During these years, he lived in and near Boston, and, although he retained the democratic equalitarianism of the Ohio frontier, he also became an adopted son of Brahmin culture.

His first novel, Their Wedding Journey (1872), grew naturally out of his travel sketches, as did A Chance Acquaintance (1873) and A Foregone Conclusion (1875), the latter depicting an Italian background. The Lady of the Aroostook (1879) and A Fearful Responsibility (1881) both contrast American and Venetian characters and deal with conflicts between love and social rank. Other works of this first period were Private Theatricals (Atlantic, 1875–76; in book form as Mrs. Farrell, 1921); The Undiscovered Country (1880), a study of the sordidness of spiritualism and the true spirituality of the Shakers; and Dr. Breen's Practice (1881), which deals with the incompetence of a society woman as a physician.

In 1881 Howells forsook the Atlantic and began serializing his stories in the Century Magazine. At the same time, he departed from his earlier comedies of manners and studies of contrasting types to begin a series of realistic character studies, particularly of characters grappling with ethical problems. The first of these, A Modern Instance (1882), was followed by A Woman's Reason (1883), which in its study of feminine nature and Boston social values lacked the breadth of its predecessor and of the masterpiece on Boston and the self‐made man that followed it, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Indian Summer (1886), the subtle portrait of a middle‐aged widow and her problem of romance, is considered second only to the portrait of Silas Lapham. The Minister's Charge (1887) presents the theme that one cannot disclaim complicity with lives that surround one, while April Hopes (1888) shows a return to the comedy of manners, although it includes a tragic presentation of young love.

In Annie Kilburn (1889), Howells deals with the contrasts among the “summer people,” the substantial inhabitants, and the laboring class of a New England town, and his consideration of false charity as against true justice shows an indictment of the existing economic system. This novel marked the change that now came to Howells's life. He moved to New York as a member of the editorial staff of Harper's, where he ranged more widely than he had under the Boston influence, and became interested in the larger problems of industrialism. A New York street railway strike, the conviction of the anarchists of the Haymarket Riot, the influence of Tolstoy, and the reading of such social reformers as Henry George, all caused him to turn toward socialism and to adapt his realistic fiction to the problems of the machine age. This transition is reflected in his first novel about New York, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), followed by The Quality of Mercy (1892), a study of the ramifications of a crime for which the economic order is primarily responsible. These were followed by An Imperative Duty (1893), a slight treatment of the problem of miscegenation; The World of Chance (1893), a record of New York literary life; and The Coast of Bohemia (1893), dealing with a young woman art student.

In A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and again in its sequel Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), he returned to his study of social and economic problems, through the medium of a Utopia. Several minor novels followed, which revert to earlier themes: An Open‐Eyed Conspiracy (1897) and Their Silver Wedding Journey (1899) reintroduced the Marches from his first novel; Ragged Lady (1899) is a story of American rusticity and European sophistication; The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897), with its portrait of Jeff Durgin, is one of the author's great works of character study; and The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904) is a dramatic handling of a moral problem. In his last novel, The Leatherwood God (1916), he deals with the Ohio frontier of his youth, which is also the scene of New Leaf Mills (1913), the chronicle of a year of his childhood.

Throughout his life, Howells wrote short stories, of which two volumes are concerned with the supernatural, but all are less important than his novels. He was also the author of 31 dramas, ranging from farce to blank‐verse tragedy, of 11 travel books, of several autobiographical works, and of a few volumes of verse. A scholarly Selected Edition of his writings (32 vols.) began publication in 1968, and Selected Letters was projected in four volumes.

During his later life, Howells was frequently considered the preeminent American man of letters, and he received many honors both in the U.S. and abroad, as well as the offer of many academic posts. In addition to advising his friend Clemens, he used his important position to aid and encourage such authors as Boyesen, Garland, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Robert Herrick, who were following the trail he had blazed. Both in his articles in the “Easy Chair” of Harper's Monthly and in such volumes as Criticism and Fiction (1891), My Literary Passions (1895), and Literature and Life (1902), he was an important critical force. His own literary credo was summed up in Criticism and Fiction, in which he championed realism and its truthful delineation of the motives, the impulses, and the principles that shape the lives of actual men and women. The sources of this realism he ascribes not only to science but to democracy, since the realist “feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men.” To this concept he also attached certain dicta of his age: that art must serve morality, that it should teach rather than amuse, and that truthfulness to American life would inevitably picture the smiling aspects of experience.