BOOKS FROM 1900
William Dean Howells
Literary Friends and Acquaintence
(1900)
William Dean Howells was a giant figure in nineteenth-century American letters. The inspired and powerful editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881, Howells championed writers such as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Henry James and George Eliot. For more than forty years he expanded the nation's literary horizons. A staunch advocate of realism in fiction, he wrote 36 novels, including The Rise of Silas Lapham.
He was less comfortable with the intimacy of autobiography. Still, in June of 1900 he completed Literary Friends and Acquaintence, a genial memoir of such literary greats as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Thank heaven I have done my reminiscences of literary Cambridge and Boston," he wrote to a friend. "They are to be booked for oblivion next fall."
As the new century took hold, Howells' reputation dimmed. After his death, Rudyard Kipling wrote that he was "the father of a multitude of heirs who have inherited his treasures but forgotten the paternity."
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