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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 Atlantic helped forge a new literary sensibility, shifting the ground of American literature from a New England Puritan romanticism to a more continental literature with a realistic and often "western" voice. He befriended, encouraged, and published many writers, notably Mark Twain and Henry James, who established a genuinely native American literary canon. Howells's columns in Harper's New Monthly Magazine advocated a new "realism"--which he defined as "the truthful treatment of material"--that broke with "fine literary airs" in favor of "the dialect, the language, that most Americans know."
A "westerner" himself, Howells was born to William Cooper and Mary Dean Howells at Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio, in 1837, the year Ralph Waldo Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar" declared America's literary independence from England.
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