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

With very few exceptions, critical commentary on the short fiction that Howells writes in the twentieth century has been curiously absent. In fact, scanning through the majority of scholarship and criticism on Howells and literary realism, one might get the impression that he simply stopped writing after the 1890s. This is, however, not unusual in American literary history, scholarship, and canon construction.¹ Among canonical American writers, Howells continues to attract both significant interest and intriguing indifference. As is true of many authors whose reputations seem codified from the reception of two or three acknowledged great works (in this case, A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New Fortunes), the attention paid to Howells’s later writing—particularly the dozens of stories he writes in the twentieth century—is not only less sustained, but also tends, when addressed at all, to be dismissed for either failing to capture the mastery of the earlier novels or as evidence of his diminished skills and intellect. This practice is, perhaps, logical and pragmatic from a pedagogical standpoint; nevertheless, it perpetuates a continuous inattention to those works that stand farthest from the canonical in accomplishment, as well as the process by which Howells experimented with new forms and expressions that challenged his literary and cultural ideas.

In this respect, most Howells scholarship has maintained a frequent refusal—willful or otherwise—to see him not only as the author of a few famous prose fictions but also as a writer whose lifelong engagement with language pushed him through generic boundaries in search of new ways of shaping narrative and questioning American identity. This study initiates just such a vision of the later Howells in the hope that, by exploring the sometimes unlikely subject matter and form that his late short fiction employs in the quarter century after his last acknowledged masterpiece A Hazard of New Fortunes, we can begin to examine his later work so as to understand his full artistic and intellectual trajectory concerning reality and fiction.