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 his close friends, may be said to rank higher in the critical esteem of the 1980s, but Howells in his own day was generally regarded as the leading American man of letters. When the magazine Literature in 1899 asked its readers to name the ten writers most worthy to become members of an American Academy, Howells's name headed the list. He later was one of the original seven elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters when it was founded in 1904, and he served as its president from 1908 until his death twelve years later. In 1912 President William Howard Taft, a fellow Ohioan, who attended Howells's seventy-fifth birthday dinner, remarked: "I have traveled from Washington to New York to do honor to the greatest living American writer and novelist." Howells himself, however, assessed his accomplishments more modestly and once wondered in a letter to Clemens if he would not be remembered chiefly because he had been Clemens's friend.
