William Dean Howells

The first full-scale biography of William Dean Howells in a generation, this book is a thoroughly researched and absorbing study of the man who, in the early twentieth century, became known as the dean of American letters. The authors make excellent use of Howell's extensive published work and private letters to create a nuanced portrait of the writer and his era. If Sinclair Lewis famously dismissed Howells as “a pious old maid whose greatest delight is to have tea at the vicarage,” Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson uncover a much darker Howells, whose brooding contemplation of injustice and suffering informed much of his writing (Henry May, The End of American Innocence, 1959, p. 8). Howells's life story took shape in many contexts, which Goodman and Dawson skillfully reconstruct: the western outpost of Ohio, where he was born and raised; the eastern establishment of Boston and New York, where he made his fame and fortune; the expansive striving of the antebellum years, as he watched his father struggle to find a footing in a burgeoning market economy; and the nervous achievement of the Gilded Age, as Howells and the country enjoyed success and pondered its costs. Europe provides another context, both as a place (Venice) where Howells spent the Civil War years and as an influence (especially through French and Russian novelists) on his emerging ideas about the novel and literary realism

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