His name was William Dean Howells, and he was born in 1837 in an Ohio town. He began life as a typesetter in a newspaper office, then he became a reporter, and was made United States consul in Venice at the age of twenty-four. It was a job which left time for art, and young Howells trained himself diligently. He became editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” the first non-Bostonian to hold that high ecclesiastical office. For years he presided at the dying bedside of New England literature, and after the patient was buried he came to New York and found a permanent berth with “Harper’s Magazine.” He wrote for sixty years, and published over a hundred volumes of poetry, criticism and fiction. He had ease and grace and charm, all the drawing-room literary virtues; he displayed the same virtues in real life, and so everybody loved him, and he became, according to Mark Twain, “the critical Court of Last Resort in this country, from whose decisions there is no appeal.” The principle upon which the success of Howells was based is revealed to us in his autobiography. He tells how as a young reporter on an Ohio newspaper, he was sent to a police court, and he quit. “If all my work could have been the reporting of sermons, with intervals of sketching the graduating ceremonies of young ladies’ seminaries”--why, then he might have become a city editor! He tells of coming upon a sordid tragedy, and resolving that forever after he would avert his eyes from the darker side of life; “the more smiling aspects of life are the more American.” You can see why he needed no Mrs. Ogi from Elmira, or from any other place, to edit his manuscripts. To dignify this program of portraying the more smiling and therefore more American aspects of life, Howells gave it the name of “realism.” All his life long he published critical articles in defense of this program, and he described these articles as “a polemic, a battle.” Also he wrote novels, which he regarded as pure, undiluted works of art. It never occurred to the dear soul that the novels were merely a continuation of his “polemic,” another phase of his “battle.” Not content with rebuking men who did wrong, Howells wished to provide examples of what was right; therefore he invented characters and contrived situations to exhibit the virtues and charms of that middle-class gentility which was always smiling and therefore always American.