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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
William Dean Howells became the first great champion of realism in American fiction, not by setting out to reach this goal, but as the logical culmination of his own development as a writer. He began to write about his own experiences and observations in the natural course of his job as a newspaper reporter. Later as American consul in Venice he continued to record and comment on his experience. Fiction entered his writing in a mild way in Their Wedding Journey (1871), when he combined experiences from two trips, created the characters of Basil and Isabel March, and invented little episodes to enliven the travelogue. In succeeding novels plot superseded geography as the unifying element, and characters were more fully drawn, but his own experiences continued to provide the raw material out of which his stories were formed.
1 George Arms, ed. “Howells's Unpublished Prefaces”, NEQ, xvn (Dec, 1944), 586.
2 Mildred Howells, ed. Life in Letters of William Dean Bowells (New York—London, [1928]), i, 404.
3 A Hazard of New Fort-unes, Library Edition (New York—London, 1911), p. vii.
4 Arms, p. 586.
6 The Daily Saratogian, Aug. 25, 1890, p. 5.
6 Aug. 13, 1890, p. 4, and Aug. 19, 1890, p. 5.
7 W. Lewis Fraser, in “Open Letters”, The Century Magazine, xliv (Oct., 1892), 959.
8 Frederic Fairchild Sherman, American Painters of Yesterday and Today (New York, 1919), p. 44.
9 The Daily Saratogian, Aug. 22, 1890, pp. 2, 5.
10 Henry James, The American Scene, ed. W. H. Auden (New York, 1946), pp. 471, 484.
11 This letter has not been located. It was sold, along with the MS of the novel, at the Anderson Galleries on Nov. 17-18, 1937 (see American Book-Prices Current, 1938). The present owner of the MS does not possess the letter.
12 In “Materials and Form in Howells's First Novels”, AL, xix (May, 1947), 158-166, William M. Gibson identifies the Howells and the Marches and shows Howells' extensive and at times verbatim use of his early newspaper sketches and travel articles in his first three novels, Their Wedding Journey, A Chance Acquaintance, and A Foregone Conclusion.
13 The American Scene, p. 475.
14 MS letter in a collection of letters to Howells in the Harvard College Library.
15 An Open-Eyed Conspiracy (New York—London, 1897), pp. 19-20.
16 Aug. 30, 1890, p. 4, and Aug. 30, 1894, p. 4.
17 Life in Letters, ii, 7.
18 The Daily Saratogian, Aug. 22, 1890, p. 8.
19 Aug. 15, 1887, p. 5.
20 The Daily Saratogian, Aug. 9, 1894, p. 4; Aug. 6, 1894, p. 4.
21 The Daily Saratogian, Aug. 10, 1891, p. 8.
22 Jean McGregor, “Chronicles of Saratoga”, The Saratogian, Oct. 5, 1945, p. 5, col. 1.
23 Hand Book of the Pompeia, A Grand Roman House (July, 1892), passim.
24 MS letter in a collection of letters to Howells in the Harvard College Library.
25 The Literary World, xxviii (Oct. 16, 1897), 355.