A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 259

happiness for all citizens. In A Traveler from Altruria and its sequel, Through the Eye

of the Needle (1907), Howells envisioned a more socialist utopia, in which all citizens

are required to work three hours a day at manual labor in return for food and other

goods from government sources. In this completely egalitarian state, property is

owned communally, most modern machinery is outlawed, family life is subordi-

nated to civic life, and even style is legislated – with fashion in everything from

clothes to architecture being under the supervision of aesthetic commissioners.

Another result of the new direction in Howells’s realism was the novel that

deserves a place with A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham among his

major fiction, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1898). The most panoramic of all his

works, the novel is set in the magazine world of New York City and explores the

conflict between labor and capital on both a personal and a general level. On the

personal level, there is, for instance, the conflict between a magazine proprietor,

Dryfoos, a millionaire capitalist, and one of his employees, a socialist called Lindau.

On the general, there is a vivid account of a strike of streetcar employees, in which

Lindau’s son is killed. Howells called A Hazard of New Fortunes “the most vital of my

fictions.” That is open to debate. What is not, however, is that it is the one among his

major fictions that is most vitally concerned with social injustice – and the one most

urgently and immediately directed toward the realization of what he termed

“democracy in literature.” Such a literature, Howells explained, “wishes to know and

to tell the truth.” And that truth was that “men are more like than unlike one

another.” “Let us make them know one another better,” Howells implored his fellow

writers, “that they may all be humbled and strengthened with a sense of their frater-

nity.” That catches a note which is there in all Howells’s criticism and fiction, with its

primary stress on human dignity and connection. For him, as for so many realists,

the ordinary was not just inspirational but also what bound humanity together:

what was commonplace was what, in the end, was held in common and shared.

Capturing the real thing

Howells never gravitated from realism to naturalism, with its emphasis on the

determining influence of heredity and environment and its harrowing depiction of

landscapes, social and natural, that are at best indifferent and at worst hostile to

humankind. There is a fundamental benevolence, a belief in human worth and

social betterment, that is caught in one of his most famous remarks in Criticism and

Fiction: “our novelists concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life,

which are the more American.” That remark would have elicited sardonic laughter

from Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?), who was known as “bitter Bierce” and the “the

wickedest man in San Francisco” among his contemporaries, and seemed to revel in

both titles. Born in Ohio, Bierce participated in the Civil War. The war disgusted

him, prompting him to see soldiers as little more than paid assassins and, when it

ended, he moved to California, where he established a reputation as a brilliant and

caustic journalist. Living in England for four years from 1872, he returned to

California. He then published Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891, retitled In the

GGray_c03.indd 259ray_c 03 .indd 259 8 8/1/2011 7:54:20 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 20 AM