William Dean Howells, realism and Hamlin Garland

William Dean Howells, novelist, short story writer, editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881 and one of the most influential critics of the period, was a significant influence in the movement towards literary realism towards the end of the nineteenth century, and in his critical advocacy of the short story form. In ‘The Editor's Study’ (1887) he wrote of ‘the foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but the expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test than that of their fidelity to it’. Howells's own best short story, ‘Editha’ (1905), is a sharply anti-idealistic story about war and conceptions of honour. In Criticism and Fiction (1891) he also advances the possibility that American writers in particular have ‘brought the short story nearer perfection in the all-round sense than almost any other people’ and ranks them only below Russian writers. And he singles out innovations of language, particularly the use of dialect, as among the writers' primary means for re-invigorating literature. American writers, he says, should ‘go into the shops and fields’ for their subjects and language, and ‘when their characters speak, I should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying Tennessean, Philadelphian, Bostonian and New York accents’. And the ultimate motivation for this movement was democratic: ‘The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art.