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Beginning with the historiography of the early Puritans, to the writings of the revolutionary colonists, the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, the romance as defined by Hawthorne, and through Howells’s own call for realism (and beyond), there has always been a revolutionary dynamic in American culture that instinctually challenges the memories of those who came before them. Though Howells would position himself as a leader engaged in a campaign to rescue memory and history from the discourse of romanticism and idealism, he also recognizes that there is nothing “natural” or stable about memory and history, or realism, for that matter. Past traditions, myths, and practices are all susceptible to various forms of manipulation, to which his own art is inextricably linked. He foresaw the day when realism, like the romance in the late nineteenth century, would no longer be relevant: “When realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too” (CF 15). The short stories, therefore, should not be seen as a retreat from his earlier cultural criticism, but as a newer, perhaps even more radical form of dissent than has ever been acknowledged.
By examining the mnemonic preoccupations of these forgotten short stories in relation to his work as a whole, this project attempts to alter the memory of Howells himself—to stop the recirculation of the dominant cultural memory of him in our social and literary history and to argue that the image often recalled is incomplete. This will not, of course, be the first study to make such a claim. Howells has often been a battleground in the fight over literary mnemonics, even while alive. Young writers trying to escape Howells’s sizable cultural shadow constructed memories of him as a prig and a prude who was only concerned with “the smiling aspects of life.” Frank Norris’s infamous critique of Howells as the master of “the drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block, [and] the excitement of an afternoon call” still persists in literary memory (1166). Ambrose Bierce called Howells a “diligent insufferable” with a “smug personality” who “has seen and heard nothing worth telling.”