Howells’ first published work appeared in 1860. The “Poems of Two Friends” were written with John J. Piatt. He began to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly, then just founded, about this time also. A campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln was written by him in 1860. For this he was appointed consul at Venice, where he remained until 1865. There he studied the Italian language and literature, and broadened his education considerably. On his return to the United States he wrote for the New York Tribune and the Nation for a time. Then in 1866 he became assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, becoming editor six years later. He was a model magazine editor. For awhile he contributed to Harper’s Magazine; then he became editor of the Cosmopolitan, and in 1900 revived “The Editor’s Easy Chair” for Harper’s. He is at present the writer of this department. Mr. Howells has received many honorary degrees. Harvard and Yale have both conferred on him the degree of Master of Arts, while he has received the degree of Doctor of Letters from Yale, Oxford, Columbia, and Princeton, and the degree of Doctor of Laws from Adelbert College. In 1909 he was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 1885 the novelist has lived in New York City. Howells is a great realist and a perfect artist in words. He was once asked if he never lost himself in his work and was carried away by what he was writing. “Never,” he answered. “The essence of achievement is to keep outside, to be entirely dispassionate, as a sculptor must be, molding his clay.” And indeed of all American writers Howells comes the nearest to success in holding the mirror up to Nature. [Illustration: THOMAS NELSON PAGE] Thomas Nelson Page, a novelist who writes of the fast vanishing old order of the South, is the subject of one of the six intaglio-gravure pictures illustrating “American Novelists.” THOMAS NELSON PAGE Monograph Number Three in The Mentor Reading Course Above all things Thomas Nelson Page is a Virginian, by birth, by family, and in his writings. Born on the old plantation of Oakland in Hanover County, Virginia, he can boast of two grandfathers who were governors of the state, one of these, Thomas Nelson, being a signer of the Declaration of Independence. It is Virginia and Virginians “before the war” and during the reconstruction period that he has sought to portray in his books.