born March 1, 1837, Martins Ferry, Ohio, U.S.
died May 11, 1920, New York, N.Y.
U.S. novelist and critic.
He wrote a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln (1860) and served as consul in Venice during Lincoln's administration. As editor of the Atlantic Monthly (187181), he became a preeminent figure in late 19th-century American letters. A champion of literary realism, he was one of the first to recognize the genius of Mark Twain and Henry James . His own novels (from 1872) depict America as it changed from a simple, egalitarian society where luck and pluck were rewarded to one in which social and economic gulfs were becoming unbridgeable. His best-known work, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), is about a self-made man's efforts to fit into Boston society. Howells risked his livelihood with his plea for clemency for the anarchists involved in the Haymarket Riot , and his deepening disillusionment with American society is reflected in the late novels Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890).