William Dean Howells’s America and What Went Wrong

March 1, 2012, will mark the 175th anniversary of William Dean Howells’s birth. Experience has disgraced my prophetic abilities more than once, but I will venture this cautious prediction: the date will pass unnoticed. Such disregard is regrettable, and was not the case in 1912, when 400 eminent writers, journalists, editors, social reformers, university presidents, and public men, including William Howard Taft, who had altered his schedule to attend, crowded Sherry’s restaurant in New York City to celebrate Howells’s 75th birthday. From England, Thomas Hardy and Henry James were only the most eminent of Howells’s contemporaries to send letters of congratulation. The gala event received front-page coverage in the New York Times and was extensively recounted in other publications, such as the Saturday Evening Post. At that moment, Howells was, the Times reported with perhaps an intentional pun, “the Dean of American letters.” As an acclaimed novelist, critic, and editor, Howells understood his place in the history of American literature. In his prepared remarks, he observed that he had known all those “in whom the story of American literature sums itself,” except for…