“Go East, young man,” or the Eurocentric Outlook of W.D. Howells

Born and brought up in the antebellum Midwest (Ohio), William Dean Howells hardly had any formal education but, working in his father’s printing office, he was able to read and proofread the articles published in local newspapers. He studied great English literature (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray) and romantic German literature (Heinrich Heine) and was able to read French, German and Spanish. He spent the Civil War as an American consul in Venice and on his return became editor of the Atlantic Monthly in which he supported both Mark Twain and Henry James, while writing novels on everyday life in the America of his time and on US travellers in Europe. In the 1880s and 1890s, he introduced American readers to the works of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Zola, Balzac and Turgenev among others. A self-committed writer, he defended the Chicago Anarchists in the Haymarket Affair and was a strong opponent of Yankee imperialism at the turn of the century. He was one of he founders of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and its first president till his death in 1920. Howells’s work and influence stand out as a bridge between Europe and the United States and an incentive to give American letters a well-deserved place in world literature.