"You're a Natural-Born Literary Man"

J am a comparatively dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over them in the pale moonlight, William Dean Howells lamented in a 1915 letter to his friend and fellow writer Henry James.' By that date, the official mustachioed Howells, the genteel man of letters (1837-1920), had been eclipsed both as a writerly figure and an authorial model. Willa Cather, some twenty years earlier, had already pronounced him numb, if not dead, to the literary marketplace. Cather commented, apropos of the publication of My Literary Passions, that 'passions,' literary or otherwise, were never Mr. Howells' forte.' In other words, Howells had cordoned himself

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