Reading for Humor or Realism: W. D. Howells and Mark Twain’s Early Reception in the U.S. Public Sphere

Abstract

In his May 1880 review of A Tramp Abroad in the Atlantic Monthly, for which he was then serving as editor-in-chief, William Dean Howells responded to what was, at the time, Mark Twain’s newest book by offering remarks that had the apparent tone of a corrective. Howells admitted that while the public’s conception of Twain was as a writer primarily, if not exclusively, of comic literature, Twain’s books were something much more. To be sure, wrote Howells, “you must laugh with him, but if you enter into the very spirit of his humor,” you sense that his is not merely comedy for its own sake. Rather, it stems “from a deep feeling” and a “personal hatred for some humbug or pretension,” which, “if he could set . . . right there would be very little laughing.”1 Several Twain scholars have pointed to this review, and to Howells’ response to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer four years earlier, as a turning point in Twain’s reception in the U.S. in the 1870s and early 1880s, marking the first recognition that Twain’s writing was much more than the effusion of a funny man and implicitly taking to task other, previous reviews for their failure to understand and appreciate Twain’s artistry.2 And, indeed, these two Howells reviews seem to validate such a reading. In the review of A Tramp Abroad, Howells emphasizes that Twain repeatedly addresses “matters that are . . . unfair or unnecessarily ignoble, and cry out to his love of justice.” “At the bottom of his heart,” claims Howells, Twain is “often . . . a reformer” engaged in the serious work of telling the truth about quotidian reality and social problems. Howells had actually begun this revisionist projection of Twain in his review of Tom Sawyer, in which Howells stressed that Twain’s first sole venture into novel writing was marked by a “fidelity to circumstance” that makes it “realistic in the highest degree.”