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As a genre, Bierce thought realism “detestable”: “Absolutely destitute of that supreme and sufficient literary endowment, imagination, he does not what he would, but what he can; takes notes with his eyes and ears and writes them up as any other reporter” (5). Likewise, the July 24, 1890, cover of Life magazine ridiculed realism in a sketch picturing a man and a woman sitting in their parlor with the following caption:
She Knows The Market
In later editions of Life, Howells is personally ridiculed by editors through cartoons (plate 2) accompanied by claims that his realism chooses to “willfully [sic] repress all the romance and poetry” while “strangling his dramatic instinct.” The editors question the purpose behind Howells’s decision to “wander in the arid planes of realism”:
Aside from realism’s supposed imaginative emptiness, Bierce and others also attacked Howells for his timidity, which they routinely connected with the feminine. Bierce described Howells’s fans as “fibrous virgins, fat matrons, and oleaginous clergymen” who enjoy “his personal progress through rectangular streets and between trim hedges of Philistia, with lettered old maids of his acquaintance curtseying from doorways” (5). Sinclair Lewis mocked Howells for having “the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight was to have teas at the vicarage” (15), and Van Wyck Brooks likewise railed against what he saw as his