William Dean Howells

1
William Dean Howells

• 1837-1920
• author, editor, and critic

2
Life--Donna M. Campbell, Gonzaga University

• Born on 1 March 1837 in Martinsville
• Howells worked as a typesetter and a printers
  apprentice, educating himself through intensive
  reading and the study of Spanish, French, Latin,
  and German.
• After a term as city editor of the Ohio State
  Journal in 1858, Howells published poems,
  stories, and reviews in the Atlantic Monthly and
  other magazines. 

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• A longer work, his campaign biography for Abraham
  Lincoln, earned him enough money to travel to New
  England and meet the great literary figures of
  the dayNathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
  Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, and
  Walt Whitman among them.
• Awarded the post of U. S. Consul to Venice in
  1861 for his service to the Lincoln campaign,
  Howells lived in Italy for nearly four years.
• During his residence there, he married Elinor
  Mead Howells in 1862, and by 1872 the couple had
  three children Winifred (b. 1863), John Mead (b.
  1868), and Mildred (b. 1872). 

4

• After leaving Venice, Howells became first the
  assistant editor (1866-71) and then the editor
  (1871-1881) of the Atlantic Monthly, a post that
  gave him enormous influence as an arbiter of
  American taste.
• Publishing work by authors such as Mark Twain and
  Henry James, both of whom would become personal
  friends, Howells became a proponent of American
  realism, and his defense of Henry James in an
  article for The Century (1882) provoked what was
  called the Realism War, with writers on both
  sides of the Atlantic ocean debating the merits
  of realistic and romantic fiction. 

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• While writing the Editors Study (1886-1892)
  and Editors Easy Chair (1899-1909) for
  Harpers New Monthly Magazine and occasional
  pieces for The North American Review, Howells
  championed the work of many writers, including
  Emily Dickinson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Hamlin
  Garland, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt,
  Frank Norris, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Abraham
  Cahan, and Stephen Crane.
• He was also responsible for promoting such
  European authors as Ibsen, Zola, Pérez Galdós,
  Verga, and Tolstoy.
• Despite Howellss professional success, his
  personal life during this period was marred in
  1889 by the premature death of his daughter
  Winifred, whose physical symptoms were
  misdiagnosed as resulting from a nervous disorder
  and were ineffectively treated. 

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• After the execution of the Haymarket radicals in
  1887, which he risked his reputation to protest,
  Howells became increasingly concerned with social
  issues, as seen in stories such as Editha
  (1905) and novels concerned with race (An
  Imperative Duty, 1892), the problems of labor
  (Annie Kilburn, 1888), and professions for women
  (The Coast of Bohemia, 1893). 

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• Widely acknowledged during the late nineteenth
  and early twentieth centuries as the Dean of
  American Letters, Howells was elected the first
  president of the American Academy of Arts and
  Letters in 1908, which instituted its Howells
  Medal for Fiction in 1915.
• By the time of his death from pneumonia on 11 May
  1920, Howells was still respected for his
  position in American literature.
• However, his later novels did not achieve the
  success of his early realistic work, and later
  authors such as Sinclair Lewis denounced
  Howellss fiction and his influence as being too
  genteel to represent the real America.

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• Although he wrote over a hundred books in various
  genres, including novels, poems, literary
  criticism, plays, memoirs, and travel narratives,
  Howells is best known today for his realistic
  fiction, including A Modern Instance (1881), on
  the then-new topic of the social consequences of
  divorce The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), his
  best-known work and one of the first novels to
  study the American businessman and A Hazard of
  New Fortunes (1890), an exploration of
  cosmopolitan life in New York City as seen
  through the eyes of Basil and Isabel March, the
  protagonists of Their Wedding Journey (1871) and
  other works.  Other important novels include Dr.
  Breens Practice, (1880), The Ministers Charge
  and Indian Summer (1886), April Hopes (1887), The
  Landlord at Lions Head (1897), and The Son of
  Royal Langbrith (1904).

9

• Howells remained proud of his Ohio roots
  throughout his life, returning to Columbus for
  the Ohio Centennial Celebration in 1888 and
  visiting his home in Jefferson late into the
  1890s.
• In the later part of his career, he drew
  increasingly on his life in Ohio in
  autobiographical works (A Boys Town,1890) and
  novels (The Kentons, 1903). 
• The legend of a man from Leatherwood Creek, Ohio,
  who convinces the people there that he is a god
  inspired one of Howellss last works, The
  Leatherwood God (1916). 

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Criticism and Fiction

• Howells' literary convictions are summed up in
  Criticism and Fiction (1891). He stressed the
  importance of common experience and the truthful
  rendering of motives and feelings.
• "Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is
  common beauty, common grandeur.... These
  conditions invite the artist to the study and
  appreciation of the common.... The arts must
  become demographic, and then we shall have the
  expression of America in art."

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• He believed art must serve morality and that it
  should provide an evaluation of character and
  experience.
• By the time of Howells' death, realism was firmly
  established in American fiction. Since then many
  novelists have gone further in portrayal of real
  experience, of economic strife, of physical
  passions, of psychological conflicts.
• Howells was a "reticent realist," restrained by
  the conventions of his time and by his own
  propriety and discretion. But he marked out the
  path that twentieth-century fiction has followed.

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Anti-imperialist Writings

• During their lifetimes, Mark Twain and William
  Dean Howells (1837-1920) were closely linked when
  their anti-imperialist writings were considered.
  In a 1903 tract, The Principles of the Founders,
  Edwin D. Mead, the prominent Boston-based
  anti-imperialist, peace advocate, and cousin of
  Howells's wife, highlighted the two writers as
  representing literary anti-imperialism outside of
  Massachusetts. This was natural. Arguably the two
  most prominent and influential literary figures
  of their time, Howells and Twain were close
  friends, and they frequently discussed
  imperialism and the war in the Philippines in
  private talks and correspondence.

13

• Howells's association with the anti-imperialist
  movement began as early as April of 1898 when he
  joined Bolton Hall, Henry Codman Potter, Ernest
  H. Crosby, Josephine Shaw Lowell and others in "A
  Peace Appeal to Labor" against the
  Spanish-American War.
• In October of the following year, stating that he
  was "heart and soul" with the organization,
  Howells joined Hall, Crosby, Carl Schurz, Henry
  Van Dyke, and others in the short lived American
  League of New York. Asked by the New York Evening
  Post about his support of the American League,
  Howells explained, "I still believe in the
  principle of the 'consent of the governed,' as a
  moral principle which is the strength of the
  republic, and in our present course in the East
  we are going counter to the principles of our own
  strength and happiness."

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• He warned against the dangers of corruption and
  racial antagonism inherent in colonial
  government, and proposed an immediate truce
  during which the United States could propose a
  form of government for the Philippines.
• The American League of New York was soon
  succeeded by the Anti-Imperialist League of New
  York which Howells joined as a vice president in
  January of 1900. Howells was clear on his support
  of the League.
• In December of 1900, when Charles C. Hughes
  included without authorization the names of many
  of the officers of the Anti-Imperialist League of
  New York among the sponsors of a new American
  Liberty League, Howells protested and refused to
  allow his name to be used.
• Both Twain and Howells signed three
  Anti-Imperialist League petitions circulated in
  1901, 1902 and 1903.

15

• Howells split with Twain in 1904 and 1905 by
  joining the two organizations formed in New York
  as moderate, conciliatory, and predominantly
  Republican alternatives to the Anti-Imperialist
  League. He was a member of the Philippine
  Independence Committee and a vice president of
  the Filipino Progress Association.
• In the fall of 1906, Howells met and discussed
  the U.S. role in the Philippines with James H.
  Blount who had recently returned from nearly six
  years as an army officer and U.S. District Court
  judge in the Philippines.
• After this meeting, Howells asked the editors of
  the North American Review to solicit an article
  on the Philippines from Blount. This request led
  to two articles, "Philippine Independence When?"
  and "Philippine Independence Why?" that were
  published, respectively, in January and June of
  1907, and reprinted, also respectively, by the
  Filipino Progress Association and the
  Anti-Imperialist League.

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• The first essay, which advocated Philippine
  independence after a ten-year period of U.S.
  tutelage in self-government, fit well with the
  Filipino Progress Association's program of
  reforms under U.S. rule leading to "ultimate
  independence."
• The second article emphasized the continuation of
  warfare in the islands beyond 1902 and the
  apparent inability of the United States to govern
  the Filipinos with justice.
• Isolated from Blount's earlier essay, it
  supported the Anti-Imperialist League's arguments
  for immediate and complete independence.

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• On January 31, 1907, Howells was reelected as a
  vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League to
  fill the space left vacant by Ernest Crosby's
  death earlier in the month.
• He signed another League petition in 1910 and
  remained one of its vice presidents until his
  death in 1920.
• http//www.boondocksnet.com/ai/howells/

18
Howells, William Dean. "Editha." Between the Dark
and the Daylight (New York Harper and Brothers,
1907).

• http//www.boondocksnet.com/ai/howells/editha.html
  In Jim Zwick, ed., Anti-Imperialism in the
  United States, 1898-1935. http//www.boondocksnet.
  com/ai/ (Dec. 9, 2002).