Edgar Watson Howe Biography Quotes 35 Report mistakes

Early Life
Edgar Watson Howe was born in 1853 in the United States and grew up amid the practical rhythms of the rural Midwest. The frontier temper of his youth mattered: work was direct, conversation was plain, and pretensions were suspect. Those habits shaped a lifelong voice that distrusted sentimentality and favored the short, sharp sentence. Like many who entered journalism in the nineteenth century, he learned the trade from the ground up, setting type and reporting small items before anyone trusted him with editorials. By the time he reached his early twenties he had already absorbed the routines of a print shop and the intricacies of keeping a small-town paper alive in a place where every subscriber mattered.

Founding a Newspaper and Finding a Voice
Howe became nationally known after establishing a daily in Atchison, Kansas, the Atchison Globe. As editor and publisher he developed a house style that was his own: crisp, skeptical paragraphs; moral observations stated without ornament; and a habit of using humor to puncture local boasting. The Globe prospered not because it flattered its readers, but because it felt useful and honest to them. Howe believed the best journalism served the common reader first, and he wrote as though every column had to earn its space by telling a truth or at least a pointed joke. Reporters and printers who worked around him recalled both his thrift and his exacting standards. The Globe's paragraphs were widely clipped and reprinted, carrying his voice far beyond Kansas.

The Story of a Country Town
In the 1880s Howe published the novel The Story of a Country Town, a stark portrait of small-town life that refused the rosy glow favored by romantic local color. The book startled readers with its plainness and won the attention of influential critics. William Dean Howells, the dean of American realism, publicly admired its candor and craft, giving the young editor a national literary endorsement that mattered in an era when critics could still launch a career. Howe's novel traveled from the prairie to the parlors of the East, and his name, already known in journalism, became known in literature as well. Although he wrote other fiction, this book remained his signature achievement in the realm of the novel.

The Editor as Aphorist
Howe's influence grew through the short forms he preferred. He proved a master of the editorial squib: a single sentence or brief paragraph that could comfort, sting, or provoke. He later devoted himself to a periodical, E. W. Howe's Monthly, a personal magazine mixing travel notes, moral observations, cantankerous complaints, and sharp advice for ordinary living. The Monthly made him a familiar voice to subscribers across the country and furnished a steady supply of epigrams that were quoted by contemporaries and clipped for other newspapers. He came to be known informally as the "Sage of Potato Hill", a label that captured the mix of rustic setting and hard-bitten wisdom his readers expected.

Circles, Allies, and Critics
The world around Howe included family, staff, readers, and fellow editors. His newsroom supplied a steady flow of talent, and the practical men and women who set type with him were among his most immediate influences. Beyond Atchison, reviewers like William Dean Howells helped to place his work in the mainstream of American letters. In the press of the Midwest he was frequently mentioned alongside peers such as William Allen White, another Kansas editor who balanced civic concern with sharp prose; even when they disagreed in temperament or policy, they occupied a shared conversation about what a newspaper owed its town. Within his own household, the craft of journalism proved contagious. His son Gene Howe became a prominent newspaper editor in Texas, extending the family's editorial tradition and carrying some of the elder Howe's bluntness into a new region and readership. The people who mattered most to Howe's daily work, however, were his subscribers, whose letters and complaints he treated as a running referendum on his performance.

Working Principles
Several steady principles guided Howe's long career. First, he believed that a small-town paper should hold its neighbors to account without malice, and that overpraise was a form of dishonesty. Second, he distrusted literary flourishes that did not earn their keep; short words were better than long ones if they told the truth faster. Third, he insisted that journalism was a business as well as a public service: a paper that could not pay its bills could not keep faith with its readers. These ideas, stated plainly in his editorials and his Monthly, gave coherence to a body of work that spanned decades and forms.

Travel, Reflection, and Later Work
As he grew older, Howe stepped back from the daily grind of the Globe and devoted more time to travel and reflective writing. He turned journeys into letters and letters into essays, using the road to test his ideas about work, thrift, vanity, and contentment. He wrote the way he edited: with an eye for small details that revealed larger truths, and with a readiness to puncture illusions. Collections of his observations circulated widely, and his reputation as a wry, skeptical observer deepened. While he never sought the pose of a grand man of letters, his steady output across journalism, fiction, and essay placed him squarely in the national conversation about American life in the decades around 1900.

Death and Legacy
Howe died in 1937, closing a career that bridged the rough-hewn frontier press and the modern, professional newsroom. He left behind the Atchison Globe as an institution, a shelf of books and pamphlets, and a style of paragraphing that editors continued to imitate. The currents of influence ran through people as much as papers: family members like Gene Howe, colleagues who learned in his shop, and readers scattered across the country who absorbed his tart sentences into their way of seeing. Critics still point to The Story of a Country Town as a landmark in Midwestern realism, but many remember him best for his editorial aphorisms, the durable, pocket-sized wisdom that outlived the day's headlines. In the lore of American journalism he endures as a model of the small-town editor at his best: independent, economical with words, and loyal to the common reader.

Our collection contains 35 quotes who is written by Edgar, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Justice - Friendship - Parenting.

• 1883 The Story of a Country Town (Novel)