ABSTRACT
The atlantic monthly was interested in the art of fiction. It performed a signal service to its readers under the editorship of William Dean Howells—from 1866, when he became assistant editor, until 1881—in making them aware of foreign novelists—Stendhal, the Goncourts, Flaubert, Zola, Bourget, Bjornson, and others; and especially Turgenev. Proficient in French and German though Perry, Howells and James were, they were getting very imperfect renderings of the original. The sadness and melancholy, as characteristic of Turgenev, becomes accepted criticism, however explained, and one of the more amusing illustrations of its widespread acceptance is to be found in Howells's novel April Hopes. Howells established, in 1877, a department in the Atlantic called the Contributors Club, where the youngest generation aired its problems, and where the art of fiction was one of the chief preoccupations.
