William Dean Howells

At the age of 21, Howells was city editor of the Ohio State Journal. He began to publish poems, stories and reviews in magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly. Howell’s first 'major' poetry publication was a joint effort with the Ohio poet John Piatt, called ‘Poems of Two Friends’. He also published a campaign biography for Abraham Lincoln around this time, earning him enough to travel to New England to meet such famous literary contemporaries as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Lowell, and Whitman. For his support of the Lincoln campaign, he was appointed US Consul to Venice in 1861, where he quickly met and married his wife-to-be, Elinor Mead Howells.



By 1966, Howells had left Venice and taken a post as assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly, which was a very influential magazine. He became a proponent of what was called ‘American realism,’ as opposed to romanticism, and defended the work of authors (whose work he had published) such as Henry James and Mark Twain – both men became personal friends of his. He would go on to champion the work of many well-known writers while writing for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and The North American Review, including Emily Dickinson, Mary Freeman, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane.



Howell enjoyed increasing professional success as a writer and critic, and was widely referred to at the time as the ‘dean of American letters.’ In 1908, he was actually elected the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, who by 1915 had instituted a ‘Howells Medal for Fiction’.



Howell's poetic output was small relative to his prose output (including such well-known novels as The Rise of Silas Lapham, Annie Kilburn, and A Hazard of New Fortunes).  In 1895, ‘Pebbles. Seven Poems’ appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. ‘Monochromes, Nine Poems’ appeared in Harper’s, 1893. The Daughter of the Storage, and Other Things in Prose and Verse  was published in 1916.