Introduction

In October, 1891, the editors of The Atlantic Monthly ran a lengthy review of William Dean Howells’s then most recent publication, Criticism and Fiction. After the requisite paragraphs paying homage to the journal’s former editor and frequent contributor, the review takes a negative turn, indicting Howells for his unconvincing arguments for literary realism and “the incoherence of his protestations” against current literary taste and trend in America.2 Although this review, among others, faintly echoes the polemics against literary baseness and squalor that had been aimed at Howells in the late 70s and early 80s, by 1891 the shock-value of literary realism had dissipated. Howells was no longer the controversial flag-bearer of an American avant-garde; he had failed to meet the high expectations of a readership seeking more from him and from his fiction than The Rise of Silas Lapham and a series of disjointed “Editor’s Study” pieces. In short, by the early 1890s Howells had failed to project a stable authorial persona and to offer to his readers a sense of the trajectory of his developing career and intellectual program.