William Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis By Lance Rub ...

Indeed, Howells wrote a flurry of autobiographical work in the twentieth century, including My Mark Twain, My Literary Passions, and Years of My Youth, suggesting the validity of Crowley’s thesis, while also gesturing toward Howells’s attempt to stave off his own increasing cultural irrelevance by affirming his memories for posterity.

Yet I do not think we should see Howells’s “intense introspection” of the past as exclusively limited to his own personal history. The autobiography as a genre is, of course, focused on memory, and Howells’s consistent employment of it suggests his understanding of the inextricability between personal and political history. Whether revealing how one is conditioned by history, or writing to assert a countermemory to more epochal historical events, Howells’s turn to autobiography in the same years as he explores amnesia and memory as subjects for his fiction reveals doubts in grand historical narratives and dominant forms of historical discourse. To be sure, while his self-examination and conjuring of the past are undoubtedly triggered by Winnie’s death and his sense of becoming a cultural relic, many Americans living between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I were similarly preoccupied with “intense introspection” without the added impetus of personal tragedy. The literary achievement of these short stories will continue to be incomplete if we do not recognize that Howells’s late short work is tapping into more collective concerns—an “intense introspection” of a nation in the throes of a memory crisis.

Howells’s recognition of the mnemonic preoccupation of his time is complicated by his awareness that all attempts to definitively narrate memory, to arrive at an objective understanding of the past, can never be stable—they are always open to fabrication and idealization. Consider the opening paragraph of his 1916 autobiography Years of My Youth: