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Howells on My Mind: Reflections on the Dean's Sesquicentennial

1988; The MIT Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/366231

1937-2213

Jerry Herron,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

W ILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, 1837-1920. The facts are well known: school drop-out, printer's helper, newspaper reporter, failed poet curries favor the greats of the New England renaissance, becomes editor of the most prestigious literary journal in America, upon which follows a long career as a prolific, successful, influential, and wealthy man of letters; then come the modernist dismissals, the ironic attacks on the Dean's prudery and mawkish realism. I am comparatively a dead cult, he wrote to Henry James in old age, with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in the pale moonlight.1l From H. L. Mencken to Sinclair Lewis, to Leslie Fiedler, and beyond, Howells has attracted a distinguished company of commentators who have kept his achievements alive, usually by despising them: actually reads the Howells novels? Who even remembers their names?