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H. L. Mencken deemed his fiction “elegant and shallow,” lacking any “universal mystery” (Prejudices 53–54), while Lewis Mumford labeled Howells “the most pathetic figure” in postbellum literature, a man whose smile “was only the inane mask of the booster” (167–168).
These mnemonic constructions of Howells underwent a dramatic shift beginning in the 1930s through more historically centered critics who recalled those memories that Bierce and others had repressed, specifically Howells’s (and realism’s) political activism. V. L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought was one of the first attempts to reshape Howells’s memory by pointing out how radical he was for his era, reminding readers of the charges of sedition and anarchy he fueled among his contemporaries, particularly with his outspoken defense of the so-called Haymarket anarchists, Teddy Roosevelt’s suggestion that Howells’s public comments led to McKinley’s assassination, and two Altrurian novels—A Traveler From Altruria and Through the Eye of the Needle—which imagined the socialist utopia as an alternative to Gilded-Age America. Arguing that Howells was “the first distinguished American man of letters to espouse Marxist socialism” (156), Parrington shifts Howells’s memory from the master of teacup dramas to a leading figure in the American literature of protest and dissent. And indeed a good deal of historical scholarship (Alfred Kazin, Walter Berthoff, Donald Pizer, Robert Hough) has focused on Howells’s intellectual and emotional investment in social and economic equality between classes and races, in the dehumanizing aspects of American business and industrial practices, and in the moral and ethical failings of imperialism.
These memories of Howells have been, in turn, challenged over the past couple of decades by the ideological and political critiques of the New Historicists. This approach, in its various incarnations, has attempted to foreground the “political unconscious” of major American writers and, very often, those twentieth-century critics responsible for their canonization.