William Dean Howells Biography Quotes 21 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation
William Dean Howells was born in 1837 in Ohio to William Cooper Howells, a printer, editor, and outspoken reformer, and Mary Dean Howells, from whom he took his middle name. His father moved the family frequently among small Ohio towns in pursuit of editorial work, and the print shop became the boy's first classroom. Typesetting, proofreading, and seeing how opinion took shape in newsprint schooled him in both craft and conscience. He read voraciously and eclectically, from Cervantes and Shakespeare to contemporary European prose, and taught himself languages useful to a future translator and critic. The modest, restless world of the frontier press also gave him an early understanding of American democracy's textures and tensions, lessons he would later transmute into fiction and criticism.

From Journalism to Diplomacy
As a young man, Howells wrote for the Ohio State Journal and other papers, producing poems, sketches, and political commentary. During the 1860 presidential campaign he helped author a life of Abraham Lincoln intended for wide circulation, an act of literary politics that signaled his capacity to translate public events into persuasive prose. After Lincoln took office, Howells was appointed U.S. consul in Venice. The posting, which took him abroad during the Civil War years, exposed him to European art and letters on a daily basis and gave him the raw material for two early books of observation, Venetian Life and Italian Journeys. Venice also shaped his sense of style: precise, lucid, and pitched toward the everyday rather than the melodramatic.

Marriage, Circle, and Return to American Letters
While embarking on his transatlantic life, Howells married Elinor Mead, whose own family formed a notable creative constellation. Her brothers included the sculptor Larkin G. Mead and the architect William Rutherford Mead, later a partner in the firm McKim, Mead & White. The marriage anchored Howells's personal world even as he moved among expatriates and diplomats. On returning to the United States, he settled in the Boston-Cambridge orbit, where he entered the circle of New England letters. He worked closely with James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and encountered Ralph Waldo Emerson and other figures whose presence defined the era's intellectual life. Those relationships mattered not only socially but also professionally: they introduced Howells to the responsibilities and opportunities of literary stewardship.

The Atlantic Monthly and the Rise of Realism
Howells joined The Atlantic Monthly, eventually becoming its editor. In that role he helped shift American taste from romantic excess to the close observation of ordinary experience. He encouraged the work of Samuel L. Clemens, known as Mark Twain, whose vernacular energy he championed in essays and reviews, and he steadily advanced the career of Henry James, whose psychological subtleties he defended to readers uneasy with his cosmopolitan themes. Howells's own fiction matured quickly during these years. A Modern Instance examined marriage and moral choice in contemporary terms. The Rise of Silas Lapham offered the quintessential portrait of a self-made businessman colliding with Boston society. Indian Summer and The Minister's Charge extended his exploration of manners and motives, while A Hazard of New Fortunes moved the stage to New York, presenting its new journalism, labor disputes, and ethnic mix as the modern American drama.

Critic, Editor, and Transatlantic Interlocutor
After leaving the Atlantic, Howells became a fixture at Harper's, where his Editor's Study columns codified his aesthetic: art should tell the truth about common life, respect the dignity of character, and eschew sensational contrivance. In Criticism and Fiction and later reflections such as My Literary Passions and Literary Friends and Acquaintance, he argued for realism as an ethical act as much as an artistic one. His sympathies extended abroad. He read and praised Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, admired the social dramas of Henrik Ibsen, and used his position to bring European realism to American attention, believing the dialogue between continents could steady a rapidly changing national literature.

Mentor to a Generation
Howells used his authority to lift emerging voices. He welcomed regional realists such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, insisting that local color could carry universal truth. He noticed the raw power of Stephen Crane and helped draw notice to his work. He wrote an influential introduction for the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, opening doors across the nation, and urged readers to attend to the artistry of Charles W. Chesnutt. With Mark Twain he maintained a long friendship that mixed affection, debate, and mutual advocacy; late in life he revisited their bond in the memoir My Mark Twain, portraying Clemens as both comic genius and moral witness.

Conscience and Public Stance
The editor who insisted on everyday truth also confronted public crises. The labor violence of the 1880s, including the fallout from the Haymarket affair, sharpened his social scrutiny. In A Traveler from Altruria and its sequel he imagined a visitor from a cooperative commonwealth, using fiction to critique American inequality. He opposed the drift toward empire after the Spanish-American War and associated with anti-imperialist voices that included Mark Twain. In An Imperative Duty he approached the subject of race and identity with a candor unusual for the period, testing realism's capacity to probe the nation's hardest questions.

Later Years, Family, and Honors
Howells spent his later decades chiefly in New York, continuing to write novels, short stories, essays, and plays, and serving as an honored presence in magazines that had once made his reputation. He experienced private griefs as well as professional rewards, and the memory work of books like A Boy's Town and Years of My Youth distilled the values of his Midwestern boyhood into a gentle, humane ethic. He was elected to leading literary societies and received academic honors that recognized his role as a standard-bearer of American prose. His home remained a resort for writers and artists, among them Henry James on his American visits and younger authors eager for counsel, while his extended family through Elinor Mead linked him to practicing artists and architects shaping American culture beyond the page.

Death and Legacy
William Dean Howells died in 1920, closing a career that had bridged provincial printing offices and international salons, the Civil War and the modern metropolis. He is remembered not only for the craft of novels such as The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes but for his stewardship of literary institutions, his championing of Mark Twain, Henry James, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Charles W. Chesnutt, and his insistence that literature meet life without evasion. Called in his time the Dean of American Letters, he lent that title its meaning by making realism both a method and a moral position. Through his pages and his protégés, the ordinary American found a voice that could be truthful, compassionate, and enduring.

Our collection contains 21 quotes who is written by William, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Mother - Live in the Moment.

Other people realated to William: Charles Dudley Warner (Journalist), Agnes Repplier (Writer), James Lane Allen (Author), Thomas W. Higginson (Clergyman)

• 1890 A Hazard of New Fortunes (Novel)
• 1888 Annie Kilburn (Novel)
• 1886 The Minister's Charge (Novel)
• 1886 Indian Summer (Novel)
• 1885 The Rise of Silas Lapham (Novel)

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