William Dean Howells, whose literary career began on the eve of the Civil War and ended after World War I, is one of the three most important American writers of the late nineteenth century. Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Henry James, both of whom were...

William Dean Howells , whose literary career began on the eve of the Civil War and ended after World War I, is one of the three most important American writers of the late nineteenth century. Samuel Clemens and Henry James, both of whom were his close...

William Dean Howells combined a career as an important novelist with that of a journalist. As editor of The Atlantic Monthly and later as author of, or contributor to, the "Editor's Study" and "Editor's Easy Chair" columns in Harper's Monthly, he was...

William Dean Howells was interviewed in 1890 for a newspaper, and he indicated his social credo and the conscience of a wise elder. He felt sympathetic to Leo Tolstoy's brand of Christian socialism, and he considered Tolstoy a brave, honest and great man. Howells...

Linda Simon is associate professor of English at Skidmore College. Before beginning his career as a novelist, William Dean Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly rejected a poem submitted to the magazine. "What I want you to do for us--and yourself,...

ALFRED KAZIN: A BIOGRAPHY By Richard M. Cook Yale University Press, 452 pages, $35 With the death of Alfred Kazin in 1998 at the age of 83, the kind of high-end literary journalism that he’d devoted his life to in over a thousand book reviews,...

In the following essay, Crowley and Crow explore psychological, psychic, and autobiographical themes in Howells's "A Sleep and a Forgetting."

In the following essay, Bardon surveys critical reaction to Howells's short fiction and discusses the defining characteristics of his sketches and short stories.)

In the following excerpt, Cady examines representations of violence in the fiction of William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane.