William Dean Howells, (1837 - 1920), U.S. novelist and critic, known as the dean of late 19th-century American letters, the champion of literary realism, and the close friend and adviser of Mark Twain and Henry James. Howells grew up in various Ohio towns and began work early as a typesetter and later as a reporter. Meanwhile, he taught himself languages, becoming well read in German, Spanish, and English classics, and began contributing poems to The Atlantic Monthly. His campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln (1860) financed a trip to New England, where he met the great men of the literary establishment, James Russell Lowell, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, and Emerson. On Lincoln’s victory he was rewarded with a consulship at Venice (1861–65), There he wrote the essays collected in his first major Venetian Life (1866).
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/273557/William-Dean-Howells
For an essay on his work as an American Consul in Venice, see this article in "American Diplomacy" (June, 2014):
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2014/0612/ca/sommers_diplomatswho.html
Illustrators are Child Hassam, Ross Turner, Rhoda Holmes Nicholls and F. Hopkinson Smith
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