Realism and radicalism: the school of Howells

Abstract

Perhaps no higher compliment can be paid to Mr. Howells than to state that those who undertake to write about Realism in America will inevitably find themselves dealing with it as though it were his private property, instead of with the doctrines and assertions of a system. William Roscoe Thayer, “The New Story-Tellers and the Doom of Realism”(1894) Appearing in Forum, William Roscoe Thayer's critical essay on the rise and, to his mind, imminent fall of American literary realism neatly presages the scholarly tradition that would follow in his wake. From Thayer's time forward, literary critics have frequently treated “Realism in America” as though it were the “private property” of William Dean Howells, the novelist, editor, and critic who shaped the field of American letters from his positions at The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Monthly, and Harper's Weekly during the final three decades of the nineteenth century. “And yet,” Thayer continues, “for a dozen years a horde of Realists, great and small, have been filling the magazines with their products and turning out an average of two novels a day.” From Thayer's vantage point, American literary realism seemed less like a private enterprise and more like a joint-stock company. In their treatment of literary realism in the late nineteenth-century United States, Thayer's contemporaries and his critical heirs have validated Thayer's predication by neglecting the “horde of Realists” in favor of the figure of Howells. As much as has been written about Henry James, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, or Stephen Crane – all of whom Howells considered realists – literary historians rarely address those figures as advocates for realism itself. Unlike these other major writers of the period, Howells left in his essays and reviews an archive of rough thinking that focuses, relentlessly, on the place of realist literature in the United States with a breadth and depth that has no equal among his contemporaries.