256 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900Howells was eventually to occupy a position at the center of literary life in America.
As an indefatigable reviewer and critic, and editor in turn of the Nation, Atlantic
Monthly, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, and Cosmopolitan, he was able to affect the
lives of three generations of American writers. At the beginning of his career, for
example, in 1860 he reviewed The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne; towards
the end, in 1915, he reviewed the first two volumes of poetry by Robert Frost. He was
acquainted personally with nearly every significant writer of the time, knowing
some of them, like Mark Twain and Henry James, as friends. He advanced the
careers of not only Twain and James but women writers like Sarah Orne Jewett,
black writers like Charles W. Chesnutt, and ethnic writers like Abraham Cahan.
His influence and contemporary eminence eventually earned him the title “dean of
American letters.” But his own origins were, appropriately for a man dedicated to
the “commonplace,” quite humble. He was born in Ohio, received little formal
education, and moved from town to town with his family, working for his father, a
printer, as a typesetter. Beginning in 1860, he had pieces published in various
national magazines. A campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln earned him the
reward of US consul in Venice, once Lincoln was elected; and, in 1865, he returned
to America to take up the first of several editorial positions. His first published
books included two based on his experiences abroad, Venetian Life (1866) and Italian
Journeys (1867). The first of his forty or so novels, Their Wedding Journey (1872) and
A Chance Acquaintance (1873), also made use of his travels. These were followed by
two fictions dealing with the contrast between Americans and Europeans, A Foregone
Conclusion (1874) and A Lady of Aroostook (1879). With his first major novel,
A Modern Instance (1882), Howells moved beyond explorations of manners to the
detailed and serious consideration of wider social issues. The novel is structured
around the twin themes of divorce and journalism. Howells was the first novelist to
focus on journalism, and developed the theme of divorce after attending a perfor-
mance of a Greek tragedy. During the composition of the book, he called it his “New
Medea,” a “modern instance” of what would happen to a couple whose marriage
gradually deteriorates. What is remarkable about it is the way that, in a strategy
characteristic of literary realism, it links the personal and the political, the emotional
and the social. It is a vivid fictional examination of moral decline in both the home
and the workplace. It is also sternly resistant to sentimentalism. No palliative is
offered for the waste of the life of the young wife, Marcia Gaylord, as she stiffens into
loneliness, or for the decline of the husband, Bartley Hubbard, from ambitious
young editor to pariah to a tawdry death in the West at the hands of someone about
whom he has published personal details in his newspaper.
The Rise of Silas Lapham also demonstrates what Howells called the “fidelity to
experience and probability of motive” that he felt was an imperative for the American
storyteller. More than A Modern Instance, it also invites the reader to what he called
“the appreciation of the common.” The central character here, Colonel Silas Lapham,
is a Vermont farmer who has risen to wealth through his paint manufacturing
business. He is a typical capitalist of the time to the extent that for him business is a
sacrament. His paint is not merely “the best on the market,” he declares, but “the bestGGray_c03.indd 256ray_c 03 .indd 256 8 8/1/2011 7:54:20 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 20 AM