ABSTRACT
William Dean Howells was born on March 1, 1837, in Martins Ferry, Ohio, one of the eight children of Mary Dean Howells and William Cooper Howells. He helped many young authors, among them Prank Norris, Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and the black writers Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt. The poet Edwin Markham, author of "The Man with the Hoe," said, "All men who are patriotic and intelligent should love William Dean Howells as one of the highest and noblest men in the modern world." On June 26, 1893, nearly six years after the Haymarket martyrs had stood on the scaffold, and one day after the monument in Waldheim Cemetery was dedicated, Governor John Peter Altgeld freed the three prisoners. Haymarket–like a bolt of lightning–was unquestionably the single searing experience that fused Howells's critique of his society and tore away the last cobwebs of illusion.
