William Dean Howells , on his odyssey from self-educated printer's devil to critic, novelist, and preeminent arbiter of American letters, passed through the offices of the Atlantic Monthly during the post-Civil War years. For fifteen years Howells and the Atlantic helped forge a new literary sensibility, shifting the ground of American literature from a New England Puritan romanticism to a more continental literature with a realistic and often "western" voice. He befriended, encouraged, and published many writers, notably Mark Twain and Henry James, who established a genuinely native American literary canon. Howells's columns in Harper's New Monthly Magazine advocated a new "realism"--which he defined as "the truthful treatment of material"--that broke with "fine literary airs" in favor of "the dialect, the language, that most Americans know."

A "westerner" himself, Howells was born to William Cooper and Mary Dean Howells at Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio, in 1837, the...