ABSTRACT
Writing for the New York Tribune on August 18, 1891, Stephen Crane recorded a portion of a lecture delivered by Hamlin Garland on William Dean Howells:
…the test of the value of Mr. Howells’s work will come fifty years from now, when his sheaf of novels will form the most accurate, sympathetic and artistic study of American Society yet made by an American. Howells is a many-sided man, a humorist of astonishing delicacy and imagination… He is by all odds the most American and vital of our literary men to-day. He stands for all that is progressive and humanitarian in our fiction, and his following increases each day. His success is very great, and it will last.1
