William Dean Howells
Life introduction:
Howells was born in a small town in Ohio and brought up in the humble surroundings of the rough-and-ready American Midwest. He had little formal education but was widely read. His successive “literary passions” included Goldsmith, Irving, Cervantes, Heine, and Tennyson; later major influences were Jane Austen, George Eliot, Turgenev, Hardy, and others. He became a reporter, and by 1860, had had three of his poems printed in The Atlantic Monthly.
As a critic of eminent standing and as a prolific writer, Howells helped to mould public taste and became the champion of literary realism in America. It is estimated that he wrote, in addition to the good number of social novels, eight critical books and about 1700 book reviews to spread the credo of realism. As editor and critic Howells was generous in constructive and sympathetic reviews, helping younger and more radical writers to get a hearing.
Literary-aesthetic ideas:
Most of Howells’ literary-aesthetic ideas are best elucidated in his Criticism and Fiction （1891）， a selection of essays he had written for his column.
His expressed aim in Their Wedding Journey was, for instance, to do nothing more than “talk of some ordinary traits of American life.” He preferred not to look upon man in his “heroic or occasional phases,” but to seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. Thus man in his natural and unaffected dullness was the object of Howells’ fictional representation.
solidityHe condemns novels of sentimentality and morbid self-sacrifice, and avoids such themes as illicit love not because of squeamihness but because they were not representative in his day.
He argues for the idea that “a free and simple design where event follows event without the fettering control of intrigue, but where all grows naturally out of character and conditions, is the supreme form of fiction.” Characters should have solidity of specification and be real.
Realism:
Howells defines realism as “fidelity to experience and probability of motive,” as a quest of the average and the habitual rather than the exceptional or the uniquely high or low.
To him realism is by no means mere photographic pictures of externals but includes a central concern with “motives” and psychological conflicts.
As Howells saw it, realism, interpreting sympathetically the “common feelings of commonplace people,” was best suited as a technique to express the spirit of America. This was so because it regarded the average as revealing a civilization’s progress more than any eccentric or capriciously unique single individual’s.
He urged writers to winnow tradition and write in keeping with current humanitarian ideals. On truth Howells held that truth is the highest beauty, but truth includes the view that morality penetrates all thing: “the beast-man will be…subdued.” With regard to literary criticism, Howells felt that the literary critic should not try to impose arbitrary or subjective evaluations on books but should fellow the detached scientist in accurate description, interpretation, and classification. The critic’s jobs was “to identify species and explain the w
eakness of a work in the light of the author’s intentions.”
Howells was a prolific writer. The greatest of all his works is The Rise of Silas Lapham in which Howells’ qualities as a novelist are shown at their best.
The Rise of Silas Lapham
Plot: The book relates the story of a new upstart in mid-nineteenth-century Boston. Silas Lapham is a self-made man. He starts his paint business from scratch and becomes a millionaire. That is his material rise in the world. Aspiring to conquer Boston polite society, he spends a lot of money on building a gorgeous house in a “respectable” area of the town. One of his daughters falls in love with a young man of an upper class family, the Coreys. Then competition becomes keener. Silas is in danger. Some English syndicate comes along to offer a handsome sum of money for some property of his which he knows the railroad needs and would force any owner out at a ruinous price. Silas is in a dilemma. Cheating, he would survive; being honest would be his undoing. He decides to be honest. As he does not sell and fails to find the money he badly needs to save his business, his co
mpany goes bankrupt. He falls and suffers, but manages to keep more people from suffering. Falling, he achieves his moral and ethical “rise.”
Appreciate: The Rise of Silas Lapham is a fine specimen of American realistic writing. Howells’ emphasis has always been on ethics. He stresses the need for sympathy and moral integrity, and the need for different social classes to harmoniously adapt to their environment and to one another. What Howells tried to recommend as a pattern of virtue was a Lapham acting on the utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
The house: To Lapham it is a symbol of his success and his aspiration for the polite society which, he dreams of conquering. But Mrs. Lapham sees it as an emblem of her husband’s selfish individualism, declaring that there is blood on its timbers; she has in mind Rogers whom her husband has squeezed out of business. Lapham’s moral rise begins with his financial fall. The burning down of the house represents the victory of Howells’ idealized view of man and society, for Howells was critical of the rise of materialism in American life.

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