A short life of the author
William Dean Howells (1 March 1837 – 11 May 1920) was an American novelist, literary critic, playwright, and editor who was, for the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the single most influential figure in American literature — a man whose editorial power shaped what was published, whose critical judgments determined what was valued, and whose advocacy of literary realism established the theoretical framework within which American fiction would develop for generations. He was called “the Dean of American Letters” with only partial irony.
Early Life and Rise
Howells was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, into a large, intellectually active family of modest means. His father was a newspaper editor, and young Howells was largely self-educated through voracious reading and the practical work of setting type and writing copy. He worked as a journalist in Ohio and wrote a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, which earned him the consulship in Venice — a reward that gave him four years of European culture and produced two of his earliest books, Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867).
On his return to America, Howells was hired as assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly in 1866 and became editor-in-chief in 1871, a position he held until 1881. As editor of the most prestigious literary magazine in the country, Howells wielded enormous influence over American literary culture. He published and promoted Mark Twain, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and many other writers who would define American literature.
The Realistic Movement
Howells’s greatest contribution to American letters was his sustained advocacy of literary realism — the doctrine that fiction should depict ordinary life truthfully, without the sentimentality, melodrama, and romantic idealization that had dominated mid-century American fiction. In his essays, collected in Criticism and Fiction (1891), Howells argued that the proper subject of fiction was “the smiling aspects of life” — a phrase that was mocked by naturalists like Frank Norris, who accused Howells of advocating a timid, middle-class realism that flinched from the harsher truths of American life.
The charge was partly fair: Howells’s realism, at least in theory, excluded the extremes of violence, sexuality, and degradation that Norris and Stephen Crane would explore. But in practice, Howells was more daring than his critics acknowledged, and his critical advocacy of realism — including his championing of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and other European realists — helped create the intellectual environment in which American naturalism could flourish.
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
Howells’s most celebrated novel follows Silas Lapham, a self-made paint manufacturer from Vermont, and his family as they attempt to break into Boston society. The novel is a comedy of manners — the Laphams’ social blunders provide much of the humour — but it is also a serious examination of the moral consequences of wealth, the relationship between business ethics and personal character, and the tensions between old money and new money in Gilded Age America.
The novel’s resolution — in which Lapham loses his fortune through a principled refusal to cheat — embodies Howells’s belief that moral integrity matters more than social or economic success. The book remains one of the essential American novels of the nineteenth century.
A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)
Howells’s most ambitious novel follows the Marches (recurring characters from earlier novels) as they move to New York City and encounter the full complexity of urban life in the Gilded Age: immigrant poverty, labour unrest, social radicalism, capitalist excess, and the conflict between conscience and comfort. The novel climaxes with a streetcar strike in which a major character is killed — a scene drawn from actual labour violence in New York.
A Hazard of New Fortunes represents Howells’s engagement with the social and economic questions of his time — an engagement that deepened after the Haymarket affair of 1886, which radicalised Howells and led him to read Tolstoy, embrace Christian socialism, and publicly defend the anarchists condemned to death.
Other Novels
Howells published over thirty novels, including A Modern Instance (1882), one of the first American novels about divorce; Indian Summer (1886), a subtle comedy set among American expatriates in Florence; and The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897), a study of a self-made man’s social ambitions. His later novels — The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904), The Leatherwood God (1916) — are less widely read but often surprisingly powerful.
Critical Legacy
Howells’s literary reputation has fluctuated dramatically. During his lifetime he was the undisputed arbiter of American literary taste. After his death, the modernists dismissed him as genteel and timid. More recently, scholars have reassessed his contribution, recognising that his advocacy of realism was genuinely consequential and that his best novels — particularly A Hazard of New Fortunes — are more complex and challenging than the caricature of “smiling realism” suggests.
Collecting Howells
Howells published prolifically and with major houses (Ticknor and Fields, Houghton Mifflin, Harper’s), and first editions are generally available. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885, Ticknor) in first edition is the most sought, typically $100–$500. Fine copies of his earlier works, especially Venetian Life (1866), are scarce and of interest to collectors of American literary history.