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 known from the 1880s to his death in 1920 as the preeminent literary realist in America. Though Howells was a part of the international realism movement, his was essentially an American literary realism whose foundation was...

William Dean Howells , on his odyssey from self-educated printer's devil to critic, novelist, and preeminent arbiter of American letters, passed through the offices of the Atlantic Monthly during the post-Civil War years. For fifteen years Howells and...

The son of a Welsh father, William Cooper Howells, and an Irish-German mother, Mary Dean Howells, William Dean Howells was born in Martin's Ferry in Belmont County, Ohio, the second of eight children. Although he had little formal education, the future...

William Dean Howells (1837-1920), American writer and editor, was an influential critic and an important novelist of the late 19th century. William Dean Howells's career spanned a period of radical change in American literature; as novelist, critic,...