Boy's Town, A
William Dean Howells
Hardcover
(Harper, July 6, 1890)
Widely acknowledged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the "Dean of American Letters," William Dean Howells was elected the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1908, which instituted its Howells Medal for Fiction in 1915. By the time of his death from pneumonia on 11 May 1920, Howells was still respected for his position in American literature. However, his later novels did not achieve the success of his early realistic work, and later authors such as Sinclair Lewis denounced Howells's fiction and his influence as being too genteel to represent the real America. Although he wrote over a hundred books in various genres, including novels, poems, literary criticism, plays, memoirs, and travel narratives, Howells is best known today for his realistic fiction, including A Modern Instance (1881), on the then-new topic of the social consequences of divorce; The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), his best-known work and one of the first novels to study the American businessman; and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), an exploration of cosmopolitan life in New York City as seen through the eyes of Basil and Isabel March, the protagonists of Their Wedding Journey (1871) and other works. Other important novels include Dr. Breen's Practice, (1880), The Minister's Charge and Indian Summer (1886), April Hopes (1887), The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897), and The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904). Howells remained proud of his Ohio roots throughout his life, returning to Columbus for the Ohio Centennial Celebration in 1888 and visiting his home in Jefferson late into the 1890s. In the later part of his career, he drew increasingly on his life in Ohio in autobiographical works (A Boy's Town,1890)