W. D.

HOWELLS 1837-1920
As a steadily productive novelist, playwright, critic, essayist, reviewer, and editor, W. D. Howells
was always in the public eye, and his influence during the 1880s and 1890s on a growing,
serious, middle-class readership was incalculable.
In his writings an entire generation discovered, through his faithful description of familiar places,
his dramatizations of ordinary lives, and his shrewd analyses of shared moral issues, its tastes, its
social behavior, its values, and its problems. Howells was by temperament genial and modest, but
he was also forthright and tough-minded. He was, as critic Lionel Trilling has observed, a deeply
civil man with a balanced sense of life. Perhaps that is why when he died, in 1920, the
spontaneous outpouring of sorrow and admiration was the kind reserved for national heroes.
Howells was born, one of eight children, in the postfrontier village of Martin's Ferry, Ohio, on
March 1, 1837, to a poor, respectable, proud, and culturally informed family. Like his
contemporary Samuel L. Clemens and his predecessor Ben Franklin, Howells went to school at
the printer's office, setting type for the series of unsuccessful newspapers that his good-natured,
somewhat impractical father owned.
Though the family moved around a good deal in Ohio, Howells's youth was emotionally secure
and, on the whole, happy. His mother, he observed, had the gift of making each child feel that he
or she was the center of the world. From his earliest years Howells had both literary passions and
literary ambitions. When he was not setting type or reading Oliver Goldsmith, Washington Irving,
William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, or other favorites, he was
teaching himself several foreign languages.
Howells tried his hand at a number of literary forms in his teens, but his first regular jobs
involved reporting for newspapers in Columbus and Cincinnati. It was as a journalist that he
made his first pilgrimage to New England in 1860, where he was welcomed by such literary
leaders as James Bussell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel
Hawthorne, who must have recognized that he possessed talent and the will to succeed as well as
courtesy and deference. A campaign biography of Lincoln, his first significant book, won for
Howells the consulship at Venice in 1861.
There he wrote a series of travel letters, eventually published as Venetian Life (1866), that made
his name known in eastern literary circles. After returning to America in 1866, he worked briefly
for the Nation in New York until James T. Fields offered him the assistant editorship of the
Atlantic Monthly, to which he had contributed some of his earliest verse before the war. (Like a
good many American authors, Howells published little poetry once he committed himself to other
forms.) In effect, Howells assumed control of the magazine from the very beginning, and he
succeeded officially to the editorship in 1871, a position he held until resigning in 1881 to have
more time to write fiction.
Because the Atlantic was the preeminent literary magazine of the day, Howells had, as a young
man, the power to make or break careers, a power he exercised both generously and responsibly.
No American editor introduced and promoted the careers of a wider variety of writers than did
Howells. Howells had been finding his way as a novelist during his ten years as editor, publishing
seven novels in this period, beginning with Their Wedding Journey (1872) and concluding with
The Undiscovered Country (1880). These first novels are short, uncomplicated linear narratives
that deliberately eschew passionate, heroic, actionpacked, and exciting adventures in favor of a
more mundane realism. In the 1880s Howells came into his own as novelist and critic.
A Modern Instance (1882) examines psychic, familial, and social disintegration under the
pressure of the secularization and urbanization of post-Civil War America, the disintegration that
is Howells's central and deepest subject. His treatment in this novel of journalism as a profession
and the issue of divorce, just beginning to emerge as a significant social fact, opened new
territories for American novelists. Three years later Howells published his most famous novel,
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).
This novel traces the moral rise of Silas Lapham, a prototypical American entrepreneur, at the
same time that it charts the collapse of the paint manufacturing company that he had built out of a
combination of sheer luck, hard work, and shady business dealings. Within a year of its
publication, Howells was profoundly affected by Russian novelist and philosopher Count Leo
Tolstoy's ideas of nonviolence, spartan living, and economic equality and publicly defended the
"Haymarket Anarchists," a group of Chicago workers, several of whom were executed without
clear proof of their complicity in a dynamiting at a public demonstration in May of 1886.
Thereafter, Howells offered more direct, ethical criticism of social and economic injustice in such
succeeding novels as the popular, large-canvassed A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and the
Utopian romance A Traveller from Altruria (1894). In these same years Howells also penetrated
more deeply into individual consciousness, particularly in two short novels. The Shadow of a
Dream (1890) and An Imperative Duty (1892). In the short story Editha (1905), Howells
characteristically explores the double moral failure of a society and of an individual who has been
corrupted by its worst values. In his later years, Howells sustained and deepened his varied
literary output. Among his novels of consequence in this period are the naturalistic The Landlord
at Lion's Head (1897) and the elegiac The Vacation of the Kelwyns (published posthumously,
1920).
He also wrote charming and vivid autobiography and reminiscence in A Boy's Town (1890) and
Years of My Youth (1916), and as he had since the 1870s, Howells continued to produce plays
and farces, which served, as one critic has remarked, as "finger exercises for his novels."
In the mid-1880s Howells had aggressively argued the case for realism and against
"romanticistic" fiction, promoting Henry James in particular at the expense of such English
novelists as Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray.
In The Editor's Study essays he wrote for Harper's Monthly starting in 1886 (some of which in
1891 he made into Criticism and Fiction), Howells attacked sentimentality of thought and feeling
and the falsification of moral nature and ethical options wherever he found them in fiction.
He believed that realism "was nothing more or less than the truthful treatment of material,"
especially the motives and actions of ordinary men and women. He insisted, sooner and more
vigorously than any other American critic, that the novel be objective or dramatic in point of
view, solidly based in convincingly motivated characters speaking the language of actual men
and women, free of contrived events or melodramatic effects, true to the particulars of a recent
time and specific place, and ethically and aesthetically seamless. Indeed, perhaps the polemical
nature of his critical stance in the 1880s did as much as anything to obscure until recently the
flexibility and range of his sensibility.
Certainly Novel-Writing and NovelReading, first delivered as a lecture in 1899, suggests more
accurately than Criticism and Fiction (1891) the shrewdness, common sense, and penetrating
thoughtfulness that characterize his criticism at its best. He ranks with James at the top of the
short list of important American critics of the late nineteenth century.
In the course of his lifelong career as literary arbiter, Howells was remarkably international in
outlook and promoted in his diverse critical writings such nonAmerican contemporaries as Ivan
Turgenev, Benito Perez Caldos, Bjornstierne Bjornson, Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, Emile Zola,
George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Howells also championed many younger American writers and
early recognized many talented women writers in the relentless stream of reviews he wrote over
six decades— among them Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, and
Emily Dickinson. He is even better known for actively promoting the careers of such emerging
realists and naturalists as Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, and Frank Norris.
The two contemporaries in whom Howells had the greatest critical confidence, however, were
Henry James and Samuel L. Clemens, both of whom he served from the 1860s on as editor and
with both of whom he also sustained personal friendships. In the late 1860s, Howells had walked
the Cambridge streets with James, discussing the present state and future prospects for the
substance and techniques of fiction. As editor of Atlantic Monthly, Howells had accepted a
number of James's early tales. Throughout his career he wrote essays and reviews in praise of
James's work; on his deathbed Howells was working on an essay, Tlie American James.
He genuinely admired and was friendly with the patrician James, but he clearly loved and was
more intimate with the rough-textured Clemens, whose childhood background was much like his.
My Mark Twain, written immediately after his friend's death in 1910, records that affection in
one of the enduring memoirs of our literary history.
By the time Howells died, he had served for thirteen years as first president of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, the organization that seeks to identify and honor the most
distinguished work in these fields, and was himself a national institution. For rebels and
iconoclasts of the 1930s such as H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and the young Van Wyck
Brooks, he epitomized the dead hand of the past, the genteel, Victorian enemy. Howells's
reputation has slowly recovered from these charges. Without denying his intelligent and
diplomatic civility, critics have come to recognize his steady, masterful style and the courage of
his liberal—at times radical—perspective in his own time.