Literary Boston As I Knew It | Page 4

them. D.W.]

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Literary Boston
As I Knew It
by William Dean Howells

LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston,
when I went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of
the Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield
Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan
importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was
suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on
that newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely
more than one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the
misery which this must have been, and which lasted in some measure
while he lived, though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his
later years. He was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now
expressed a most gratifying interest when I told him what I was going
to do in Boston. He gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the
dramatic quality of the fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was
about to share in the destinies of the great literary periodical of New
England.

I.
I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the
liveliest newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the
East in a refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an
unknown quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely
any literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England
origin, for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and
women in the "splendid exile" of New York. The Atlantic Monthly,
which was distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England
magazine, though from the first it had been characterized by what was
more national, what was more universal, in the New England
temperament. Its chief contributors for nearly twenty years were
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel
Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple, Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward
Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs. Phelps Ward, and other New
England writers who still lived in New England, and largely in the
region of Boston. Occasionally there came a poem from Bryant, at New
York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and Mrs. Stoddard, from
Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these, except the last,

were not only of New England race, but of New England birth. I think
there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D. Conway, and as
yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets from Ohio,
who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had appeared
in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New York, had
written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely
represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock.
It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri,
became a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that
Mr. Bret Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was
telegraphed almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a
prince. Miss Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr.
James Whitcomb Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas,
Octave Thanet, Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs.
Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin Garland, all whom I name at random among
other Western writers, were then as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss
Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace King, Mr. Joel Chandler
Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South, which they by no means
fully represent.
The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to
discover any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those
days very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England.
If the case is now different, and the best known among living American
writers are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and
West have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news
writers now more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be
so very sure that they are not still characterized by New England ideals
and examples. On the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day
we were characterized by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that
we failed in so far as we expressed something native quite in our own
way. The literary theories we accepted were New England theories, the
criticism we valued was New England criticism, or, more strictly
speaking, Boston theories, Boston criticism.
Of those