Brief Chronology of Selected Works and Events in the Life of William Dean Howells
1830 | 1840 |
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1860 | 1870 |
1880 | 1890 | 1900 | 1910 | 1920 |
For more biographical information, see Edwin Cady's two-volume biography of Howells, John Crowley's The Black Heart's Truth, Kenneth Lynn's 1971 biography, and other works from the bibliography.
Year | Events | Works (Titles and dates of first American editions appear as listed in the University of California's Melvyl library system and checked against the Facts on File bibliography listing on Howells. . Please e-mail corrections to this chronology.) |
1837
top. |
March 1. William Dean Howells is born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, to William Cooper and Mary Dean Howells, the second child and second son of their eight children | |
1840
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William Cooper Howells becomes editor of the Hamilton, Ohio, Intelligencer and publishes a Swedenborgian newspaper called The Retina on the side. | |
1848 |
Trying to gather support for the Free Soil party, William Cooper Howells quits the Intelligencer over a matter of principle. The family moves to Dayton, Eureka Mills, and other places in Ohio. | |
1851
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The Howells family moves to Columbus for 18 months and later to Ashtabula and Jefferson (in 1853); Howells works as a printer. According to Edwin Cady, Howells could "set type at six, was a useful hand at nine, and when he was eleven he could set five thousand ems a day, a man's work" (The Road to Realism 25). | |
1852 | Without William Dean Howells's knowledge, his father has one of WDH's poems published in the Ohio State Journal. | |
1853 | Howells's first published fiction, "A Tale of Love and Politics, Adventures of a Printer Boy," appears in the Ashtabula Sentinel | |
1856 | William Cooper Howells is elected Clerk of the State House of Representatives. | |
1857 | Howells begins to learn German and to admire the poet Heinrich Heine. He writes a column ("Letter from Columbus") for the Daily Cincinnati Gazette. | |
1858 | Autumn. Howells begins work for the Ohio State Journal, writing reviews, poems, and stories, and translating stories from French, German, and Spanish newspapers. | |
1860
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Howells meets Elinor Mead, his future wife. He travels to Boston and Concord (see Literary Friends and Acquaintance) where he meets J. T. Fields, Lowell, Holmes, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson. |
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1861 | Sails from New York to Liverpool and then Venice to take up consular appointment. | |
1862 | Christmas Eve. Marries Elinor Mead at the American embassy in Paris. | |
1863 | December 17. First child, Winifred, born to WD and Elinor Howells. | |
1864 |
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1865-66 | WDH lives in New York as a freelance journalist. | |
1866 | Meets James T. Fields on January 7; Fields offers Howells the assistant editorship of the Atlantic Monthly a few days later. Howells settles on Berkley St. in Cambridge, Mass. | Venetian Life |
1867 | Italian Journeys | |
1868 | August 14. The Howellses' second child, John
Mead Howells, is born.
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1869 | Howells meets Mark Twain in Fields's office, the beginning of a friendship that will last the rest of their lives. | No Love Lost: A Romance of Travel |
1871
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July 1. Howells becomes the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, a post he will keep for the next ten years. | Suburban Sketches
Their Wedding Journey. Howells's first novel.(Boston: Osgood, 1871) |
1872
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1873 | A Chance Acquaintance
Poems. Augmented edition: 1886. |
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1875 | A Foregone Conclusion
Private Theatricals (published as Mrs. Farrell in 1921) serialized in the November, 1875 Atlantic. It is the only one of Howells's novels not immediately published in book form after serialization. |
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1876
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Some time before this summer, Howells attends a performance of Euripedes'Medea, an experience that inspires A Modern Instance. |
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1877
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Out of the Question: A Comedy
A Counterfeit Presentment (play) |
1879 | The Lady of the Aroostook | |
1880
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The Undiscovered Country | |
1881 | A Fearful Responsibility, and Other Stories
Doctor Breen's Practice: A Novel |
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1882 |
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A Modern Instance: A Novel
A Fearful Responsibility and Tonelli's Marriage (stories) |
1883 | A Woman's Reason
The Sleeping Car: A Farce |
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1884 | August. Howells buys a house at 302
Beacon Street in Boston, two doors away from Oliver Wendell Holmes.
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1885 |
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1886 |
May 4. During an Anarchist meeting in Haymarket Square, Chicago, bombs explode, killing one man and injuring seven more. In the absence of suspects, eight Anarchists are charged with murder and seven are sentenced to hang. Outraged at the injustice, WDH writes a letter to the New York Tribune in protest, and, after the men are hanged on November 11, an editorial letter called "A Word for the Dead." |
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1887 |
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The Minister's Charge
Modern Italian Poets: Essays and Versions (derived from the Lowell Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1870) |
1888 |
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1889 | Hoping to cure his daughter Winnie's persistent and mysterious illness, Howells puts her under the care of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, originator of the "rest cure" made famous in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." Howells writes to Mark Twain, "If she could have been allowed to read, I think the experiment might have succeeded, but I think the privation has thrown her thoughts back upon her, and made her morbid and hypochondriacal" (Crowley 116). Mitchell and others have diagnosed Winnie's illness as psychological in origin, but after she dies on March 3, an autopsy reveals physical disease. The death devastates WD and Elinor Howells. |
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1890
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An "Editor's Study" column criticizes Harold Frederic's In the Valley but praises Seth's Brother's Wife (1887) and The Lawton Girl (1890). In 1899, Howells lists Frederic's masterpiece, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), as one of the country's major serious novels. |
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1891 | Howells moves to New York, and, according to Edwin Cady and others, brings the "literary center of the country" with him. | Criticism and Fiction |
1892 | March. Howells's last column for the "Editor's Study" |
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1893 | March. Stephen Crane sends Howells a copy of Maggie; Howells reads it and praises it in a newspaper interview, working from that day forward to get it republished. WDH reads the manuscripts of George's Mother, Crane's poems, and The Third Violet, but not The Red Badge of Courage. | The World of Chance: A Novel (serial
version at MOA)
My Year in a Log Cabin (essay and memoir; reprinted from 1887 article for Youth's Companion) The Coast of Bohemia: A Novel "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business" Evening Dress: Farce |
1894 |
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1895 | Begins "Life and Letters" essay review column for Harper's Weekly (March 30, 1895-February 26, 1898) |
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1896 | On the recommendation of James Herne, WDH reads Paul Laurence Dunbar's privately printed Majors and Minors and praises it in his Harper's Weekly "Life and Letters" column. He persuades literary agent Ripley Hitchcock to place Dunbar's work and writes an introduction for Dunbar's next volume, Lyrics of Lowly Life. |
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1897 |
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The Story of a Play: A Novel |
1899 | Their Silver Wedding Journey
Ragged Lady, a Novel |
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1900
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1901 | Heroines of Fiction
The Niagara Book (with Mark Twain and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler) A Pair of Patient Lovers |
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1902 |
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1903 |
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Letters Home (novel)
Questionable Shapes Evening-Dress (farce) |
1904 | The Son of Royal Langbrith | |
1905 |
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1906 |
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1907 |
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1908 |
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1909 | Seven English Cities
The Mother and the Father: Dramatic Passages Boy life; stories and readings selected from the works of William Dean Howells, and arranged for supplementary reading in elementary schools (ed. Percival Chubb) |
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1910
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1911 | Howells joins with Edith Wharton and others in an attempt to get the Nobel Prize in literature for Henry James. The attempt is unsuccessful. | The Writings of William Dean Howells (edition)
Parting Friends: A Farce |
1913 | New Leaf Mills: A Chronicle
(based on the Howells family's Eureka Mills experiment)
Familiar Spanish Travels |
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1914 | The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon: A Fantasy (story) | |
1915 | Harper's agrees to pay Howells $5,000 a year for the "Editor's Easy Chair" and occasional introductions to books. WDH buys a Model T Ford. | |
1916 | Death of Henry James | The Leatherwood God (novel)
Years of My Youth (autobiography to 1860) The Daughter of the Storage and Other Things in Prose and Verse (poems) The Book of the Homeless, ed. Edith Wharton (contributors: Wharton, Edith; Brooke, Rupert; Conrad, Joseph; Galsworthy, John; Hardy, Thomas; James, Henry; Howells, William Dean;Yeats, W. B.) Buying a Horse |
1917 | ||
1918 | ||
1919 | Eighty Years and After | |
1920
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May 11. In New York, Howells dies in his sleep. | The Vacation of the Kelwyns, an Idyl of the Middle Eighteen-Seventies (published posthumously) |
© 1997-2003 by D. Campbell.
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