Howells, William Dean

HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN (1837–1920). Born on the frontier in Ohio, William Dean Howells was the son of a crusading abolitionist printer and newspaper editor. Young Howells picked up rough-and-ready radical politics even before his teens. By 1861 he had written a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln and was rewarded with an appointment as U.S. consul in Venice. When he returned to the United States in 1865, still a radical Republican, he quickly landed on his feet as assistant editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, where he remained until 1881, publishing well-received novels and critical essays, basking in the company of Boston Brahmins, and learning how to be genteel and politically orthodox. Even during his Boston years, Howells still used his position in the world of letters to champion unorthodox writers. His defense of the new realists, people like Rebecca Harding Davis, Hamlin Garland, and Ed Howe, reflected ambiguities within Howells. While he was proclaiming that “the smiling aspects of life are the more American,” the writers he praised and published were dealing with the dark side of emerging industrial capitalism, with poverty, ignorance, and oppression in mills, in city slums, and on the farms. By 1885 Howells experienced savage attacks from critics in England and America for the realism he defended as well as the realism in his own novels. “Practical atheism” and “mental and moral pathology,” one critic, Hamilton Wright Mabie, snarled about The Rise of Silas Lapham. One event in 1887 precipitated Howells again into the public world of radical politics. When seven Chicago anarchists were sentenced to death for the “Haymarket Affair” of 4 May 188(5, Howells, alone among the established literary lights, defied his publishers, his fellow writers, the press, and his readers by speaking out in defense of the condemned men. On 6 November 1887, Howells wrote in the New York Tribune that the trial had not established the guilt of the defendants, and he urged the commutation of the sentences. On 12 November four of the condemned were hanged. Howells continued to agonize about the injustice: “It blackens my life,” he wrote. “This free Republic has killed 5 men for their opinions.” For his courageous action Howells had to endure a storm of criticism, but he stood his ground. From 1887 on, his writing assumed a darker tone, a recognition that something had gone deeply wrong with the system. His novels Annie Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), A Traveler from Altruria (1894), and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907) dealt with strikes, with class injustice, with socialism. Deeply influenced by Tolstoy and William Morris, Howells now began to commit himself more earnestly and publicly to radical writing and radical politics. He championed the black writers Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt; recommended realistic novels about slum life, Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Abraham Cahan’s Yekl; spoke out for equality for blacks and suffrage for women. In 1898 he publicly opposed the Spanish-American War and became president of the Anti-Imperialist League. He called himself a socialist although he never joined any socialist groups.

In old age Howells became an odd mixture of radical and conservative. President William Howard Taft spoke at his seventy-fifth birthday fete about his lucid style and kindly humor, but W. E. B. Du Bois also praised the seventy-five-year-old writer for his humanity and justice: “When a band of earnest men” spoke for Negro emancipation, “William Dean Howells was among the first to sign the call. From this call came the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” And at seventy-five Howells marched in a parade for woman suffrage. While remaining unrepentant for his stance on America’s imperialist war in 1898, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Allied cause in World War I. Eight years after his death, his daughter Mildred published his literary letters.

Cady, Edwin H., and Norma W. Cady. Critical Essays on W. D. Howells, 1866–1920. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.

Cady, Edwin H. Young Howells and John Brown: Episodes in a Radical Education. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985.

Garlin, Sender. Three American Radicals: John Swinton, Crusading Editor; Charles P. Steinmetz, Scientist and Socialist; and William Dean Howells and the Haymarket Era. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991.

Goodman, Susan and Carl Dawson. William Dean Howells: A Writer's Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Finding Guide, Clara and Rudolf Kirk collection of William Dean Howells material, 1860-1963. Ms. Coll. 1027 University of Pennsylvania: Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

Hough, Robert L. The Quiet Rebel: William Dean Howells as Social Commentator. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959.

Howells, Mildred, ed.. Life in Letters of William Dean Howells. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.

William Dean Howells Society, Washington State University.; https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/howells/hsites.htm