Southerner in the late-nineteenth-century tradition and style, lawyer, politican, civic mover-and-shaker, forthright newsman, executive, and shrewd judge of talent: all of these expressions describe Evan P. Howell, the native Georgian who helped to put the young Atlanta Constitution on its feet, financially and editorially. and guided its progress for twenty years before editorial control passed to one of his sons.

His journalist experience was scant when he acquired a half interest in the Constitution in October 1876. A native of Warsaw, Georgia, Evan Park Howell was the first of eight children born to Clark Howell and his second wife, Effiah Jane Park Howell. (Clark Howell already had one child by his first wife and would later have two more by a third.) The family moved to Atlanta when Howell was nine years old; they lived in the town for two years, then moved to a home on the bank...