Howells, WILLIAM DEAN, a popular American novelist, was born at Martin's Ferry, Ohio, 1st March 1837. His father's family was of Welsh Quaker origin, and he himself was brought up a Swedenborgian. From an early age he was familiar with press-work, as his father was a busy and not always prosperous printer and journalist; but his earliest serious work in journalism was in the Cincinnati Gazette and Columbus State Journal. A life of Lincoln, written in 1860, procured him the post of consul at Venice, which he held from 1861 to 1865, making himself master of Italian the while, and writing his able papers, collected in Venetian Life (1866). After his return to America he wrote for the New York Tribune and the Times, the Nation, and the Atlantic Monthly, and filled the editor's chair of the last from 1872 till his retirement in 1881. His later work in periodicals was done for the Century and Harper's Magazine. He had already made his mark as a first-rate journalist, a fair poet, and a clever critic, when in 1871 he found his real work as a writer of fiction. His clever story, Their Wedding Journey, at once brought him popularity which quickly grew in England no less than America, as the growing merit of succeeding novels made it more and more deserved. Of these the best are A Chance Acquaintance (1873), A Foregone Conclusion (1874), A Counterfeit Presentment (1877), The Lady of the Aroostook (1878), The Undiscovered Country (1880), Doctor Breen's Practice (1883), A Modern Instance (1883), A Woman's Reason (1884), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), An Indian Summer (1886), Annie Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), and The World of Chance (1893).
These works reveal their author to us as an artist of great conscientiousness and industry, but of decided shortcomings as well as gifts. He is humorous, brilliant, epigrammatic, and acute, but he cannot tell a story, and his ambitious analysis of commonplace characters is overdone to the extent of tediousness. With all his gifts he is not a great artist in fiction, and he lacks that rare combination of sympathy and humour which gave George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell their insight into what was really generic and human at the heart of the trivialities of everyday life. Howells wastes his strength on the over-elaboration of details, but too often these are not the really significant, and thus the general effect of the whole portrait is feeble, indistinct, and unsatisfactory. His over-elaborated rather than really refined Bostonians, and his Americans expanding spiritually under the new conditions of an ancient civilisation in some Italian city are always carefully painted and indeed striking portraits, but almost always they fall a little short of the one thing needful—that look of the life which is creation, and which evidently demands the intuition of genius to catch.