SOURCE: “Howells or James?” edited by Darrel Abel, in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. III, No. 2, Summer, 1957, pp. 159-64.

In the following essay, Abel introduces Fuller's essay, maintaining that it documents Fuller's early inclination toward realism.

The paper by Henry Blake Fuller which is here published for the first time¹ was apparently completed in 1885.² By this date William Dean Howells, who at the outset of his fictional career had been classified as an “idyllist” and romancer, was now explicitly committed to realism, and had acknowledged Henry James to be the leader of a new American school of realistic novelists. Howells called realism “almost the only literary movement of our time that has vitality in it,”³ and praised James as the leader of the new movement in the United States:

The art of fiction has in fact become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and...