The Humble Origin and Lasting Impact of William Dean Howells

In this installment of ‘Profiles in History,’ a self-educated Ohioan rose through the literary ranks to become known as the Dean of American Letters.

William Dean Howells, circa 1908, full-length portrait, seated on porch. Library of Congress. Public Domain

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was one of eight children born to William and Mary Howells in Ohio’s oldest settlement, Martins Ferry. Young Howells was named after both parents, taking his father’s first and his mother’s middle names. The recipient of an intermittent and rather brief formal education, he relied on his father’s workplaces to supplement his educational shortcomings.

His father’s career as an editor and publisher of various publications introduced young Howells to the printing industry. It also forced the Howells family to move about the country when opportunities presented themselves. In 1840, elder William became editor of the Intelligencer in Hamilton, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati. He also briefly self-published a religious Swedenborgian publication during this time (from 1843 to 1844).

William Cooper Howells, father of William Dean Howells. Public Domain

The family’s time in Hamilton ended around 1848 after Howells resigned his editorship seemingly due to political disagreements. The family moved to Dayton, where he became publisher of the new Transcript, which young Howells recalled as “a disastrous newspaper enterprise” that lasted about as long as the Swedenborgian publication. It is around this time that young Howell’s formal education came to a complete end, as his entrance into the labor force became a familial necessity.

The family arrived in Eureka Mills in 1850 where his father was selected to transform the sawmills and gristmills into papermills, a “never-accomplished transformation.” For all his father’s editorial and political efforts, the family was undoubtedly poor. They moved into a rude log cabin, and despite its rotten floors, broken roof, and tobacco spit-effaced walls, the family turned it into a home. He wrote fondly of that home about four decades later in “My Year in a Log Cabin.”

Unmistakably, the elder Howells’s love for literature and his ability to find beauty and humor in almost any situation left an indelible mark on his young son.

First Works

As indicated by Howells’s book, the family stayed in the log cabin for a year before moving to Columbus where the elder Howells combined his political and editorial talents when he became the legislative reporter for the Ohio State Journal.

The young Howells, now about 14 years old, became a printer, and had long proven to be as efficient and experienced as an adult laborer. His biographer, Edwin Cady, claimed Howells could “set type at six, was a useful hand at nine, and when he was eleven he could set five thousand ems per day, a man’s work.” It was around this time that he began teaching himself Spanish. (He would also soon begin teaching himself German and French.)

Growing up in a literature-loving home and working in the print industry lent itself to Howells’s early attempts at his own writing. As a young boy, he wrote a mock epic set in ancient Rome called “The Battle of the Cats.” One of his early poems was published in the Ohio State Journal thanks to his father (though his father did it without his son knowing). When the legislative session ended, so did the elder Howells’s position with the paper. He thus purchased a share in the Ashtabula Sentinel in the northern town of Ashtabula, Ohio, located on Lake Erie, and became the paper’s editor.

Young Howells was a hypochondriac. His neuroticism about his health was a lifelong ailment, leading to career disruptions. One of his earliest disruptions came in 1854 while working as a typesetter for the Sentinel. Along with suffering from migraines, he feared he would contract and die of rabies, which caused him to leave his typesetting position. He soon recovered and wrote “The Independence Candidate,” a novel serialized by the Sentinel.

Good Years

He briefly considered a career in law but abandoned the pursuit to return to the publishing industry. He did so by moving to Columbus, the state’s capital. He began writing a column for the Daily Cincinnati Gazette and accepted a position at the Cincinnati paper as the city editor. In the same vein as his father, his time at the paper was brief, as he returned to Columbus in 1858.

The year 1858 proved to be a year of personal growth for Howells. His time teaching himself Spanish, German, and French paid off, when he began writing for the familiar Ohio State Journal. He wrote poetry, stories, and reviews, and also translated articles from the aforementioned languages. He also wrote several stories for the Sentinel about his steamboat excursions to St. Louis.

American author and editor William Dean Howells in 1866. The Century Association. NYPL Digital Gallery. Public Domain

His linguistic and literary talents were getting noticed and he was invited for dinner at the home of Salmon P. Chase, the soon-to-be secretary of state for Abraham Lincoln.

Howells kept pen to paper and received a reward for his literary efforts when the prominent Atlantic Monthly accepted his poem “Andenken” at the end of 1859 and published it in its January 1860 issue. Its editor, James Russell Lowell, who was a Harvard professor and one of the “fireside poets," would become a close friend. Later that year, Howells published his first book of poetry, “Poems of Two Friends,” with friend and fellow poet John J. Piatt.

More importantly, that year, he was asked by Wilson Follett, of Follett, Foster and Company, the publishing firm that published his book of poetry, to write a campaign biography about Republican Party candidate Abraham Lincoln. He was not given much time to write it. Howells, a Christian and an abolitionist, was apparently inspired to accomplish the task, completing “Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin” in about a week.

Title page of Howells's campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln. Public Domain

Love, Friends, and Venice

With the money he was paid for the biography, he took a trip to New England where he met Lowell, as well as other literary figures Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. This same year back in Columbus, he met Elinor Mead, with whom he would fall in love and marry two years later in 1862 and have three children. It was a perfect match, as Howells noted she possessed “unerring artistic taste.”

Howells’s literary talent and his exceptional network of literary lights helped boost his reputation. The year before he married Mead, Lincoln appointed Howells American consul to Venice, a position he held until 1865. Upon his return to the United States, Howells was made assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly (from 1866 to 1871) and then chief editor (from 1871 to 1881). During this period, he became close friends with Lowell, Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry James, and Mark Twain.

(L–R) Four distinguished literary Americans; William D. Howells, Mark Twain, Henry M. Alden, and Mayo W. Hazeltine, in Lakewood, N.J. Public Domain

Howells voraciously wrote articles, poetry, and travel books. Shortly after his return from Europe, he published “Venetian Life” (1866), then “Italian Journeys” (1867) and “No Love Lost: A Romance of Travel” (1869), now considered a work of cultural importance. As editor of The Atlantic Monthly, he also wrote literary criticisms and would play a significant role in defining the genre of realism.

Defining Realism

Howells had grown up reading the Romantics, but he believed these works did not reflect reality. For some critics, Howells was accused of being “unsympathetic to books of romance.” But, for Howells, it was not merely a matter of preference, but proper definition. “What I object to is the romantic thing which asks to be accepted with all its fantasticality on the ground of reality; that seems to me hopelessly bad,” he once contended.

Howells not only defined the genre for Americans, but he attempted to do so for foreign works as well, assisted by his linguistic skills. Furthermore, Howells proved willing to confront his fellow literary compatriots regarding strict definitions of realism and romanticism. In a criticism published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1880, Howells wrote, “No one better than Mr. [Henry] James knows the radical difference between a romance and a novel, but he speaks now of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne’s novels, and now of his romances, throughout, as if the terms were convertible; whereas the romance and the novel are as distinct as the poem and the novel.”

‘The Dean of American Letters’

In 1871, Howells published “Their Wedding Journey,” his first novel in which he utilized his experiences in travel, marriage, and life in the middle class, to write it. He followed with “A Foregone Conclusion” in 1875, a novel that received favorable reception from critics. Shortly after, he attended a theatrical performance of Euripides’s “Medea,” which inspired his first masterpiece novel, “A Modern Instance,” which was published in 1882. This was followed by another success, “A Woman’s Reason” (1883).

Arguably his most important work, “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” was first serialized in The Century from November 1884 to August 1885. It was published as a book in 1885 and remains a classic, continuing to be republished over the decades. His other successful novels included “Indian Summer” (1886) and “A Hazard of New Fortunes” (1890).

The first edition copy of "The Rise of Silas Lapham." Public Domain

Along with the sudden influx of novel writing, Howells continued to write poetry, articles, short stories, and literary criticisms, specifically for Harper’s Monthly after his departure from The Atlantic Monthly. His many criticisms thus introduced Americans to many national and international writers, including Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Thomas Hardy, Emile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, and Ivan Turgenev.

Howells was not concerned about his place in the pantheon of realist writers, as, according to novelist and historian Louis Auchincloss, he was “a kind of John the Baptist to proclaim the coming of his younger friend Henry James, whose early work he had promoted and whose genius he generously declared to be far superior to his own.”

The self-educated Howells was consistently honored in academic circles, receiving honors from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Oxford. In 1908, Howells was elected as first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (AAAL). The AAAL began awarding its Gold Medal for fiction every year starting in 1915. Ten years later and five years after Howells’ death, it was renamed the Howells Medal for Fiction. By the time of his death, Howells had written more than 100 books, and many other works of fiction and nonfiction, and had long been considered the Dean of American Letters.

Regarding the lasting power of Howells’s literature, Owen Wister, the Western novelist who championed the cowboy as the American hero, wrote in 1937,

“William Dean Howells has left our literature a large company of men and women so true to life that, although he created them in an epoch that has passed, we can travel about the United States and see many still like them today. Indeed, if there be a writer whose books are more crowded with veracious portraits of his fellow Americans, firmly and subtly painted, I don’t know him.”

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