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American Literature: Realism and Naturalism Period: Howells

A research topic guide covering the realism and naturalism periods of American literature.

William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells (1837 - 1920) was an American novelist and literary critic. His nickname was "The Dean of American Letters." His most well-known works included The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria. 

Research and Reference

Author's Works & Perspectives

William Dean Howells: A Writer's Life

Possibly the most influential figure in the history of American letters, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was, among other things, a leading novelist in the realist tradition, a formative influence on many of America's finest writers, and an outspoken opponent of social injustice. This biography, the first comprehensive work on Howells in fifty years, enters the consciousness of the man and his times, revealing a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism. Written with verve and originality in a highly absorbing style, it brings alive for a new generation a literary and cultural pioneer who played a key role in creating the American artistic ethos. William Dean Howells traces the writer's life from his boyhood in Ohio before the Civil War, to his consularship in Italy under President Lincoln, to his rise as editor of Atlantic Monthly. It looks at his writing, which included novels, poems, plays, children's books, and criticism. Howells had many powerful friendships among the literati of his day; and here we find an especially rich examination of the relationship between Howells and Mark Twain. Howells was, as Twain called him, "the boss" of literary critics--his support almost single-handedly made the careers of many writers, including African Americans like Paul Dunbar and women like Sarah Orne Jewett. Showcasing many noteworthy personalities--Henry James, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and many others--William Dean Howells portrays a man who stood at the center of American literature through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Boy Life

William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author and literary critic. He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey, in 1871, but his literary reputation really took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which describes the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham is perhaps his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur in the paint business. His social views were also strongly reflected in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). While known primarily as a novelist, his short story "Editha" (1905) - included in the collection Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907) - appears in many anthologies of American literature. Howells also wrote plays, criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Ibsen, Zola, Verga, and, especially, Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputations in the United States. He also wrote critically in support of many American writers. It is perhaps in this role that he had his greatest influence.

William Dean Howells: Novels 1875-1886 (LOA #8)

The four novels collected in this Library of America volume are among the classic works from the immensely productive career of America's most influential man of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. William Dean Howells was a champion of French and Russian realistic writers and a brilliant advocate of the most controversial American writers of his own time. In AForegone Conclusion(1875), a young American painter roams through Europe for years before at last deciding to marry the woman who, he erroneously thinks, has been in love with an Italian priest turned agnostic.A Modern Instance(1882) offers an unflinching portrait of an unhappy marriage and ends with a hero barred by his perhaps overscrupulous conscience from marrying the divorced heroine. Once again personal dilemmas are seen as symptoms of the rapid displacement of older social and religious stabilities by opportunism and commercial progress. One of the most engaging of all his novels,Indian Summer(1885), is touched with the Jamesian glamour of romantic confusion among two American couples in Italy. Here Howells's realism takes a quietly humorous turn. Situations which might be exploited by another novelist for their theatrical or melodramatic possibilities are instead eroded by the often trivial or casual experiences of everyday living. Characteristically, Howells is opposed to exaggeration in the interest of discovering how people, despite the crises that beset them, manage to find their way. The Rise of Silas Lapham(1885), Howells's best-known work, gives a brilliantly skeptical portrait of American business life and its perils, celebrating not the rise but the loss of fortune that makes possible the hero's recovery of his earlier integrity and happiness. "There are," remarked a contemporary reviewer, "thousands of Silas Laphams throughout the United States," and present-day readers might agree that there still are. LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Seven English Cities

Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in the transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from Liverpool to any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is most worthy to be seen and known, and no one who looks up from

The Dean of American Letters

The final volume of John W. Crowley's trilogy of works on William Dean Howells, this book focuses on the much neglected last decades of the author's life. It was during this period that Howells, already well known as a writer, became a kind of cultural icon, the so-called "Dean of American Letters." Beginning with A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), Crowley sets Howells's later life and work into a personal as well as a public context. He traces the gradual construction of Howells's "Deanship" and its disastrous effects on his reputation, as the self-consciously aging writer sought to adapt, sometimes painfully, to a rapidly changing literary marketplace. We see Howells targeting audiences, trying to generate saleable ideas, worrying about marketing, and reflecting on the influence of commercial competition on art and creativity. In the end, Crowley sees Howells's rise to prominence as an early manifestation of the commodification of culture that came to dominate American letters during the twentieth century. At the same time, he succeeds in conveying the humane virtues that Howells never relinquished--his graciousness, his humility, and his geniality.

The Rise of Silas Lapham

This edition of The Rise of Silas Lapham reprints the text established by Walter J. Meserve and David J. Nordloh for A Selected Edition of W. D. Howells.