In "retirement" at his country home, Potato Hill, the crusty editor-novelist published single-handedly his
E. W. Howe's Monthly (1911-1933), wrote articles and stories for mass-circulation magazines, and compiled many books of perceptive comments on his travels and his commonsense philosophy. During this time, H. L. Mencken and others hailed the aphoristic Atchisonian as the "Country Town Philosopher," the "Kansas Diogenes," and the "Sage of Potato Hill."
Howe's engaging autobiography, Plain People (1929), is not always factually reliable. Edgar Watson Howe was born on a farm in Wabash County, Indiana, on a site that later became Treaty, Indiana. According to biographer Calder M. Pickett, three years later Henry and Elizabeth Irwin Howe, with their infant son and two children from Elizabeth's first marriage, trekked west to Fairview, Harrison County, Missouri. Henry and Elizabeth Howe had four more children. Later, E. W. Howe claimed that, from sheer boredom, he learned to read before starting school; he grew up knowing not only unremitting toil but whippings conferred by his father, a Methodist preacher and abolitionist. After serving briefly in the Civil War, Henry Howe bought a newspaper in the county seat, Bethany, Missouri, where, as a printer on this newspaper, the Union of States, young Edgar learned to compose sentences.
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