Travel in the life and writings of William Dean Howells

Abstract

My approach to the problem of American travel in the nineteenth century was through the periodicals. In Harper's Monthly, Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's Monthly (later the Century), Putnam's Magazine, Lippincott's Magazine, and Scribner's Magazine, I found a wealth of travel sketches, articles on travelling in general, and reviews of travel books. It seemed then best to limit the study to one representative traveller of the particular time I wanted to study, the post-Civil War years, and the one outstanding in that era was William Dean Howells. He had written a number of travel books, he was a literary man of wide renown, and in his position as Dean of American Letters he had had various things to say about the place of travel in American literature. This study, then, attempts to show what effect travel, both in America and Europe, had upon the life and writings of William Dean Howells