Returning to this country, he re-entered the newspaper world, working mostly for the _New York Tribune_ and the _New York Times_; and he also became a regular contributor to _The Nation_. In 1866 he achieved his great ambition, Mr. Fields appointing him assistant editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_. From that year until 1886, when he moved to New York, he lived on terms of enviable intimacy with the group of great writers which made Boston the one brilliant literary centre the country has ever seen. However, this success did not come until after many defeats. Mr. Howells's letters from Venice were published regularly in the _Boston Advertiser_; but elsewhere, for the most part, the young author had met little encouragement. It was only just before he left Venice, when Lowell, then, with Prof. Charles Eliot Norton, joint editor of the _North American Review_, accepted Howells's article on "Recent Italian Comedy," that the cloud broke. Lowell accepted the manuscript in "one of his loveliest letters," as Mr. Howells says. "His message" the author confesses, "came after years of thwarted endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something in literature. To be sure, the letters in the _Advertiser_ had begun to make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from my diplomatic chief in Vienna; but I valued my admission to the _North American_ peculiarly because it was Lowell let me in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest honor." Financially, the encouragement was slight. The _North American_ was "as poor as it was proud"; and it paid Howells for his article at the rate of only two dollars a page. From the _Advertiser_ he had been paid at the rate of about a dollar a thousand words. It was on March 19, 1866, his twenty-ninth birthday, that the vagrant author began his work on _The Atlantic_ at a salary of fifty dollars a week. "The whole affair," Mr. Howells writes, "was conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the course of humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this bit of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly."