Howells, William Dean

William Dean Howells (1837–1920), author, editor, and critic, was one of the first American writers to depict late-19th-century urban life in a realistic literary style in his works The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). He also encouraged realist writing during his editorship of the Atlantic Monthly magazine by supporting authors such as Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Bret Harte.

Born in 1837 in Martinsville (now Martin's Ferry), Ohio, Howells grew up in a large, close-knit family, the second of eight children. His father was a printer and publisher who took his family to live in a log cabin for a year as an experiment in utopian living. Howells's formal education ended at the age of 10 when he began work in his father's printing office. A voracious reader who taught himself several European languages, Howells submitted poems and articles to local papers in the 1850s and became city editor of the Ohio State Journal in 1858. In 1860, he was commissioned to write a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, who won the 1861 presidential election; Howells was rewarded with an appointment as U.S. consul to Venice, Italy, where he moved in 1861. Howells remained in Italy for 4 years with his wife, Elinor Mead Howells (whom he married in Paris in 1862), and their first child, daughter Winifred, born in 1863. The couple also had a son, John, in 1868, and a second daughter, Mildred, in 1872.

When the family returned to the United States in 1865, Howells was made assistant editor of the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly, and the family settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1871, Howells became editor of the magazine, a post he held for 10 years. In 1891, Howells and his family moved to New York City, where he edited Cosmopolitan for 6 months and then began working for Harper's Monthly, for whom he [Page 366]wrote several columns until his death in 1920. In the 1890s, Howells grew extremely dismayed by the social inequality of the city and published the utopian romance A Traveler From Altruria (1894).

Throughout his lifetime and at the time of his death, Howells was widely acknowledged as the dean of American letters, and he was elected the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1908. Although Howells published more than 100 books in a variety of genres, he remains best known for his realist fiction, including A Modern Instance (1881), one of the first novels to treat the social consequences of divorce; The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), which treats an American businessman's upward mobility in Boston; and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), an exploration of cosmopolitan life in New York City.