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Book Review: The Dean of American Letters
Jul. 10th, 2026 12:20 pmJohn W. Crowley’s The Dean of American Letters: The Late Career of William Dean Howells is not so much focused on Howells’ later fiction as on how the literary public elevated him to the rank of Dean of American Letters (partly because the pun was irresistible, but he did wield a great deal of influence through his column at Harper’s), which ended up tanking his reputation during the post-Great War shredding of all things Victorian.
Although in his younger days Howells had been considered something of a troublemaker, his elevation to Dean marked him as not merely a member of, but the embodiment of the Establishment. So when the Establishment fell, it was open season on Howells. Younger writers derided his work as stuffy and sissified, often without having ever read his novels. They certainly had no awareness that he had championed shocking authors like Ibsen and Zola. (I don’t know if Ibsen is still shocking, but Zola will probably be shocking as long as there are novels.)
He also wrote his own “J’accuse” defending the Haymarket anarchists. They were sentenced to death on the grounds that their anarchist beliefs had incited the Haymarket bombing, even though none of them had actually been involved with the bombing. At the time, the Haymarket anarchists were so widely loathed that no one else in America was willing to go on record saying "we are hanging these men for their BELIEFS and that's FUCKED UP."
Aside from writers in translation like Ibsen and Zola (and Turgenev, and Tolstoy…), Howells also helped launch the careers of many American authors: Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt, among others. But obviously not even Howells could read or appreciate every single deserving author, and some of them clearly held a grudge, notably Theodore Dreiser, who probably gotten off on the wrong foot by faking (!) an interview with Howells in the late 1890s. So beyond the basic generational conflict, there were some writers with personal axes to grind.
(Howells may have never read Dreiser, although Dreiser later claimed that he once ran into Howells in the offices at Harper’s, where Howells told him, “You know, I don’t like Sister Carrie,” and walked on. Brutal. Absolutely ice cold. Dreiser very much admired Howells, so you can see how an encounter like that would turn his love to hate, assuming of course that it actually happened.
I have never read Dreiser but nonetheless have a strongly negative opinion of his work: an American Thomas Hardy, writing grim boring slogs that no one reads except when it’s assigned in class. I’ve also escaped the misfortune of reading Thomas Hardy. It is actually quite fun to lambast authors whose work you haven’t read.)
A bit of a downer, but full of interesting tidbits about the publishing market in the years around 1900. For instance, serialization in a magazine prior to publication in book form was seen as a sign of quality, so Howells knew he was on the way down when no one would serialize The Kentons.
To end on a lighter note: I laughed at this gripe from an aspiring writer, who wrote to the Century magazine, “If you do not take some of my contributions, I shall have to resort to the humiliation of being discovered by William Dean Howells.”
Although in his younger days Howells had been considered something of a troublemaker, his elevation to Dean marked him as not merely a member of, but the embodiment of the Establishment. So when the Establishment fell, it was open season on Howells. Younger writers derided his work as stuffy and sissified, often without having ever read his novels. They certainly had no awareness that he had championed shocking authors like Ibsen and Zola. (I don’t know if Ibsen is still shocking, but Zola will probably be shocking as long as there are novels.)
He also wrote his own “J’accuse” defending the Haymarket anarchists. They were sentenced to death on the grounds that their anarchist beliefs had incited the Haymarket bombing, even though none of them had actually been involved with the bombing. At the time, the Haymarket anarchists were so widely loathed that no one else in America was willing to go on record saying "we are hanging these men for their BELIEFS and that's FUCKED UP."
Aside from writers in translation like Ibsen and Zola (and Turgenev, and Tolstoy…), Howells also helped launch the careers of many American authors: Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt, among others. But obviously not even Howells could read or appreciate every single deserving author, and some of them clearly held a grudge, notably Theodore Dreiser, who probably gotten off on the wrong foot by faking (!) an interview with Howells in the late 1890s. So beyond the basic generational conflict, there were some writers with personal axes to grind.
(Howells may have never read Dreiser, although Dreiser later claimed that he once ran into Howells in the offices at Harper’s, where Howells told him, “You know, I don’t like Sister Carrie,” and walked on. Brutal. Absolutely ice cold. Dreiser very much admired Howells, so you can see how an encounter like that would turn his love to hate, assuming of course that it actually happened.
I have never read Dreiser but nonetheless have a strongly negative opinion of his work: an American Thomas Hardy, writing grim boring slogs that no one reads except when it’s assigned in class. I’ve also escaped the misfortune of reading Thomas Hardy. It is actually quite fun to lambast authors whose work you haven’t read.)
A bit of a downer, but full of interesting tidbits about the publishing market in the years around 1900. For instance, serialization in a magazine prior to publication in book form was seen as a sign of quality, so Howells knew he was on the way down when no one would serialize The Kentons.
To end on a lighter note: I laughed at this gripe from an aspiring writer, who wrote to the Century magazine, “If you do not take some of my contributions, I shall have to resort to the humiliation of being discovered by William Dean Howells.”
