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 an influential man of letters. Through The Atlantic Monthly he introduced a generation of readers to little-known foreign authors and helped young American writers to get started. He wrote forty-three novels as well as short stories, plays, poetry, several volumes of autobiography, two presidential campaign biographies, and a dozen volumes of literary reminiscences, sketches, and essays. In addition Howells wrote ten accomplished travel books, and he used situations and observations from his travels, especially in Italy, in some of his novels and short stories. The encounters of young and often innocent American women with older, more worldly European men figure prominently in his fiction.

Howells was...