Howells, William Dean (1837–1920), playwright. Although this distinguished man of letters was best known as a novelist, editor, essayist, and critic, he also figured prominently in the development of the American theatre. His first play was Samson (1874), a translation of D'Aste's Sansone written for the actor Charles Pope; it held the stage intermittently for twenty‐five years. Lawrence Barrett was responsible for the presentation of Howells's two best‐known dramas: the romance A Counterfeit Presentment (1877) and the blank‐verse tragedy Yorick's Love (1878). One of his more interesting efforts was his collaboration with Mark Twain on Colonel Sellers as a Scientist (1887). In all, Howells wrote about three dozen plays, many of them one‐acters and most centered on Back Bay Boston characters. Their dialogue is infinitely superior to most stage dialogue of the time, and their scenes would appear to make for good theatre. Yet many of them were never produced, and those that were often had small success. They were collected by Walter J. Meserve in 1960 and published by New York University Press. Biography: William Dean Howells: A Critical Study, Delmar G. Cooke, 1922.

William Dean Howells (1837-1920), American writer and editor, was an influential critic and an important novelist of the late 19th century.

William Dean Howells's career spanned a period of radical change in American literature; as novelist, critic, and editor, he contributed greatly to those changes. An advocate of honesty and social responsibility in literature, he led the struggle against escapist fantasy and for realistic and morally and politically committed fiction.

Howells was born March 1, 1837, at Martin's Ferry, Ohio. His father was a country printer and journalist who displayed the best American frontier traits - independence, self-reliance, and conscience. William spent scarcely a year in the classroom, but his father's offices afforded a thorough and meaningful education. In Years of My Youth (1916) Howells recalled his earliest training: "I could set type very well, and at ten years and onward till journalism became my university, the printing office was mainly my school."

When William was 3 the family moved to Hamilton - the delightful book A Boy's Town (1890) records experiences there. The family moved to Dayton when he was 11 and, after a memorable year in a log cabin, to Columbus when he was 13. Two years later the elder Howells became editor of the Ashtabula Sentinel. During these years young Howells taught himself German, French, Spanish, and some Latin; he became conversant with great poets, especially Shakespeare, and grew to love such prose masterpieces as Don Quixote. By 1857, when he returned to Columbus to work as a political reporter, Howells had acquired a truly liberal education.

Author and Propagandist

Howells inherited his father's strong abolitionist convictions. These are reflected in the narrative poem "The Pilot's Story, " a pathetic account of a slave girl's suicide, which was one of several of Howells's poems published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1860. More important, he wrote an official campaign biography supporting the Republican candidates in the 1860 election. The Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin may have helped elect Lincoln and change the history of America; it unquestionably changed Howells's personal history.

Though Howells saw many friends marching off to fight in the Civil War, he had little interest in joining them. He had applied for a diplomatic appointment and was finally given Venice. The months before his departure were important; traveling east, he met some of America's most important writers: James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in Massachusetts; Walt Whitman in New York. Returning to Columbus, he met Elinor Mead, a young woman who was visiting her cousin, Rutherford B. Hayes. They were married in 1862 and sustained a happy relationship for 48 years.

Howells's Italian experiences, together with his discovery of the comedies of the 18th-century dramatist Carlo Goldoni, turned him from poetry to prose, from romance to realism, and from provincial to cosmopolitan subjects. Some of his best fiction would treat Americans in Italy, but the first fruits of his foreign residence were travel sketches, published in American periodicals, and a graceful volume of impressions, Venetian Life (1866), which went through a score of editions in his lifetime.

Career as Editor

Howells returned to America with his wife and infant daughter in 1865. He accepted an editorial post on the Nation in New York, but his ambition was to live in Boston and work on the Atlantic Monthly. In January 1866 the offer came, and Howells's 14-year association with the country's most respected magazine began. He served as assistant editor until 1871 and as editor in chief to 1881. His literary judgments soon dominated the Atlantic, which he transformed from a regional to a national magazine. He published the work of talented local-color writers from every part of the country: Sarah Orne Jewett, Edward Eggleston, Bret Harte, and many more. He featured works of fellow pioneers of the new realism and important writings of two of his closest friends, Henry James and Mark Twain. Neither of those giants could abide the other's writings; Howells could admire, help, and learn from both. Both writers had reason to be grateful for the enthusiastic reviews. Howells published in the Atlantic: James because his difficult prose might otherwise have attracted no audience at all, Twain because his humorous tales might have appealed only to the uncultivated if they had not borne the imprimatur of the Atlantic.

Howells's relation with Twain has given rise to some controversy; hostile critics claimed that he censored or bowdlerized the works of his exuberant friend. In fact, Howells was a remarkably helpful editor and critic for Twain, as he was for many lesser writers. An honorary master of arts degree from Harvard University (1867) and an appointment there as university lecturer (1869-1871) were recognition of Howells's self-taught attainments. He was later offered professorships at Johns Hopkins University and at Harvard but was not attracted to the academic life.

Career as Novelist

In 1871 Howells published his first novel, Their Wedding Journey. The book follows Basil and Isabel March on their honeymoon trip from Boston to Quebec. Basil is Howells only slightly disguised; Isabel is Mrs. Howells. These two characters appear again and again in Howells's fiction, usually at some distance from the center of the action. Throughout his career, Howells treated his characters with a gentle irony that at once humanizes them and calls attention to their weaknesses. Howells was honest with everyone, most of all with himself.

The novels Howells published in the next 10 years were consistently good but, with the exception of The Undiscovered Country (1880), they are low-key and perhaps a little drab. In these years he was reading and praising European realists, especially the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who confirmed many ideas Howells had already come to: for example, that character counts for more than action in fiction, and that dialogue, not exposition, should carry the burden of a novel. These ideas were revealed in Howells's first major novel, A Modern Instance (1882), the tragic story of an impossible marriage that ends in divorce. This was the first compassionate treatment in American fiction of the problems of a divorced woman.

In 1881 Howells resigned his editorship of the Atlantic and in 1882 took his wife and three children to Europe for a year. Of the novels of the 1880s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is the most famous. In this story of a self-made man who tries to buy social position in Boston for his country-bred family, Howells broadened his scope to include characters of a variety of backgrounds and classes. In The Minister's Charge (1887) Howells for the first time introduced the concept of "complicity" - the responsibility everyone shares for each individual's deeds. While he was writing the book in 1886, a bomb exploded during a political meeting in Chicago's Haymarket. There were casualties, and a group of anarchists was charged - falsely, it appeared - with murder. Howells was shocked and took a leading part in a national campaign for justice for the unpopular anarchists, but justice was denied.

Howells's awareness of social and class injustice and of each man's complicity in such injustice was strengthened by his reading of another Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, whose influence is apparent in the structure of A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). In this book the Marches (like the Howellses) have moved to New York; a newly rich family is seeking social acceptance; a journalist is seeking a magazine that will give him editorial freedom; and class is trying to speak to class, region to region, generation to generation. The novel is compassionate, humane, and tragic. Other social problems also engaged Howells's attention. In the impressive novella An Imperative Duty (1892), he argued eloquently against racism at a moment when his readers were turning rapidly toward white supremacist doctrines. He presented his ideas of a good society, essentially socialistic and libertarian, in the long tale A Traveler from Altruria (1894).

Literary Critic

In 1886 Howells had begun the regular review column, "Editor's Study, " in Harper's. He moved this column from one magazine to another during the 1890s, returning to Harper's in 1900. His reviews consistently recognized the best in contemporary literature. He was the first critic of note to praise Stephen Crane and the only important critic to review Emily Dickinson's poems with real appreciation. The principles of his literary judgments are set out in Criticism and Fiction (1891), a work of enduring importance. My Literary Passions (1895), Heroines of Fiction (1901), and My Mark Twain (1910) are other critical works of interest.

Every conceivable honor came to Howells (known as "the Dean") in the last 20 years of his life - honorary doctorates, the first presidency of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the most practical of prizes, a library edition of his own writings (1911). In 1916 he published The Leatherwood God, a powerful analysis of religious frenzy on the early American frontier, and in 1920 The Vacation of the Kelwyns, a "summer idyll" rich in wisdom, humor, and sadness. The book is in every way Howells's, but the title was the publisher's, for the novelist had died in New York City on May 11, 1920, before its publication.

Further Reading

The literary situation in Howells's America is well delineated in his Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900). Among his other memoirs are My Year in a Log Cabin (1893) and Impressions and Experiences (1896). Edwin H. Cady's The Road to Realism (1956) and The Realist at War (1958) together constitute the best biography of Howells. Kenneth S. Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (1971), is another excellent choice. Clara M. Kirk and Rudolf Kirk, William Dean Howells (1962), is an impressive shorter study combining biography and criticism. Van Wyck Brook, Howells: His Life and World (1959), is impressionistic but valuable. Kermit Vanderbilt, The Achievement of William Dean Howells (1968), reinterprets the major novels convincingly. Howells is placed in the context of his time in Larzer Ziff's excellent The American 1890s (1966).

Additional Sources

Alexander, William Raymond Hall, William Dean Howells, the realist as humanist, New York, N.Y.: B. Franklin, 1981.

Cady, Edwin Harrison, The realist at war: the mature years, 1885-1920, of William Dean Howells, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Cady, Edwin Harrison, The road to realism: the early years, 1837-1885, of William Dean Howells, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986, 1956.

Cady, Edwin Harrison, Young Howells & John Brown: episodes in a radical education, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985.

Cook, Don Lewis, William Dean Howells: the Kittery years, Kittery Point, Me.: William Dean Howells Memorial Committee, 1991.

Crowley, John William, The black heart's truth: the early career of W.D. Howells, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985.

Howells, William Dean, Years of my youth, and three essays, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1975.

The mask of fiction: essays on W.D. Howells, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

Olsen, Rodney D., Dancing in chains: the youth of William Dean Howells, New York: New York University Press, 1991.

For more information on William Dean Howells, visit Britannica.com.

(1837-1920), novelist, critic, and editor. At no period in its history did American literary culture have so widely acknowledged a spokesman as in those decades from the 1870s to 1920 when Howells edited literary journals and championed realism in critical essays and the novels he produced at the rate of almost one a year. He discovered and promoted young writers as different as Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Abraham Cahan. He also created an American readership for such European masters as Émile Zola and Leo Tolstoy and served as valued adviser and friend to Mark Twain and Henry James. Among other things, it was he who suggested a way out of the impasse that had caused Twain to put Huckleberry Finn aside and it was he who published the work of the young James and served as the model for the mature James's characterization of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors.

Although critical opinion has elevated the works of Twain and James above those of Howells, he has never wanted for an appreciative readership. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) are probably his most significant works, but the artistry he brought to everything he wrote (some thirty works of travel, criticism, biography, and memoirs in addition to his many volumes of fiction) still serves to make it accessible to interested readers.

Born in Ohio, the son of a printer and country journalist, Howells received his most important schooling in the print shop where he learned the journalist's craft and after hours taught himself German, Italian, and Spanish, shaping his taste by reading in those literatures as well as English and American works. While working as a reporter at the state capital he wrote a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln and his running mate Hannibal Hamlin that resulted in his being awarded the U.S. consulship in Venice upon their election. En route to his post in 1860 he stopped off in Boston to visit James Russell Lowell who had accepted a poem of his for publication in the Atlantic and through Lowell met the famous literati of New England.

In 1871 Howells became editor-in-chief of the Atlantic. During his tenure he wrote more than four hundred book reviews and began his long career as a novelist. When in 1886 he accepted the editorship of Harper's Monthly, his move was seen as the definitive sign that New York had succeeded Boston as the nation's literary capital.

Howells supplied continuity to a culture too often fragmented in terms of the East versus the West, elite versus popular tastes, and cosmopolitanism versus nationalism. His doctrine of literary realism also bridged the centuries. In the 1870s his refutation of the orthodox belief that fiction was wicked unless it portrayed an idealized world purified of the grit and ambiguity of everyday life drew heavy fire from sentimentalists. And in the 1900s the naturalists were angered by his contention that although realism entailed the faithful depiction of everyday life, the fictional portrayal of an amoral universe was not justified. Rather than diminishing Howells, however, these opposing viewpoints define the nature of his achievement.

Bibliography:

George Arms and William M. Gibson, A Bibliography of William Dean Howells (1948); Kenneth S. Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (1971).

Author:

Larzer Ziff

See also Literature; Magazines and Newspapers.

1837–1920, American novelist, critic, and editor, b. Martins Ferry, Ohio. Both in his own novels and in his critical writing, Howells was a champion of realism in American literature. His education was gained by voracious reading as he worked for his father, a printer in various small towns in Ohio. Howells early turned to writing and to editorial work on the Ohio State Journal (1856–61). He wrote a campaign biography of Lincoln in 1860 and was given an appointment as consul in Venice in 1861. The first of his many travel books, Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journey (1867), brought popular success and recognition. After his return to the United States in 1865, he worked for various periodicals. Settling in Boston, he was associated with The Atlantic for 15 years and later wrote the “Editor's Study” (1886–91) and the “Easy Chair” (1900–1920) for Harper's Magazine.

His first novels, Their Wedding Journey (1872), The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), and others, were moralistic comedies of manners that aroused only mild interest. However, when he turned to realism with A Modern Instance (1882) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), he became a leading novelist. In these two books, which are regarded as his major achievements, Howells portrayed with minute detail characters attempting to solve lifelike problems, often arising from social distinctions. His unromantic love story, Indian Summer (1886), was also highly popular. Howells' critical essays on the works of such realistic European writers as Tolstoy, Zola, and Ibsen helped to mold American taste, and he was a literary mentor to Mark Twain, Hamlin Garland, Thorstein Veblen, and Stephen Crane.

From the late 1880s on Howells spent much of his time New York City. During these years he became more and more concerned with social conflict and the problems of industrialization. Socialist thought is apparent in his novels A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), The Quality of Mercy (1892), and An Imperative Duty (1893), and even more forthright in his utopian works, A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907). He was an amazingly prolific author; besides his many novels he wrote plays ranging from blank verse tragedy to farce; critical works; several volumes of reminiscence; and short stories. The most notable of his critical volumes is Criticism and Fiction (1891). His books of reminiscences include A Boy's Town (1890), My Year in a Log Cabin (1893), Impressions and Experiences (1896), Literary Friends and Acquaintances (1900), My Mark Twain (1910), and Years of My Youth (1916).

Bibliography

See his life in letters (ed. by his daughter, Mildred Howells, 1928); biographies by E. H. Cady (2 vol., 1956–58, repr. 1986), K. S. Lynn (1972), and S. Goodman and C. Dawson (2005); studies by E. H. Cady (1956 and 1958, both repr. 1986) and as ed. with L. J. Budd (1993), G. N. Bennett (1973), K. E. Eble (1982), J. W. Crowley (1985 and 1999), and P. Abeln (2004); bibliography by V. J. Brenni (1973).

(1837-1920)

1860	Poems of Two Friends. A poetic collaboration written while Howells and Piatt worked at the Ohio State Journal. Although the work is not a commercial success, James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, praises the poems and their authors. Poems of Two Friends is Howells's first book of verse.
1860	Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin. Howells's first prose book is this campaign biography. Rewarded by Lincoln with a consular position in Venice, he remains there during the Civil War.
1866	Venetian Life. Howells had been rewarded for his campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln by an appointment as consul to Venice, where he sat out the Civil War. Here he revises a series of travel letters he had written for the Boston Advertiser; it would be followed by Italian Journeys (1867).
1872	Their Wedding Journey. Howells's first novel tells of Basil and Isabel March's honeymoon travels to Niagara Falls, on the St. Lawrence, and in Boston. These characters would reappear in nine more of Howells's works, and many elements of the story are based on his own life. The story, distinguished for its perceptive descriptions of people and places, wins critical and commercial success. Henry Adams, writing for the North American Review, declares that the book possesses an "extreme and almost photographic truth to nature, and remarkable delicacy and lightness of touch." Howells returns to the Marches in Their Silver Wedding Journey (1899).
1873	A Chance Acquaintance. Howells's second novel is a social comedy in which Kitty Ellison, a New York girl, travels to Quebec and back through Boston. She falls in love with a distinguished Boston gentleman, but she refuses his proposal after she sees that he is embarrassed by her in front of his Boston acquaintances. The novel is noted for its descriptions of the St. Lawrence and Saguenay Rivers and for Kitty's awe on her first glimpse of Boston, taken from the author's own experience of the city.
1874	Samson. Howells's first drama is a translation of Ippolito D'Aste's Sansone written for actor Charles Pope. It was performed for the next twenty-five years.
1875	A Foregone Conclusion. The novel, set in Venice, is first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and gains Howells critical and commercial success. The story concerns an American girl traveling in Italy; she meets a priest who falls in love with her. The critics laud the depth of the priest's character, and the novel's success leads to numerous reprintings and translations and a later dramatization. Howells also begins to publish his novel Private Theatricals (completed in 1876) in the Atlantic Monthly. It would not appear in book form until after Howells's death, primarily because of the threat of a lawsuit by the owners of the New Hampshire inn where the novel is set. It includes one of Howells's best female characterizations and an attack on the ideals of love and courtship presented in sentimental romances.
1877	A Counterfeit Presentment. One of Howells's biggest successes as a dramatist is this play about the romance between a woman and an artist who bears a striking resemblance to her former fiancé but who turns out to be a criminal.
1878	Yorick's Love. Howells's drama is a free adaptation in blank verse of the Spanish dramatist Manuel Tamayo y Baus's play Un drama nuevo, which features the jester from Hamlet in a tragic romance.
1879	The Lady of the Aroostook. Howells's novel tells the story of a naive Massachusetts schoolteacher who sails on the Aroostook to Italy, where she is harassed by a drunken man and meets her future husband, the Boston socialite James Staniford. Among Howells's most realistic novels, it questions the morals of an American ingenue amid European culture and customs.
1880	The Undiscovered Country. One of Howells's best novels treats loss of faith and moral and social disorder during the post-Civil War period. It has been viewed as an updated version of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, contrasting false spiritualists with the genuine faith of the Shakers.
1881	Dr. Breen's Practice. Howells provides an early study of a woman doctor. He also publishes A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories, featuring the title novella, which draws on his experiences as consul to Venice.
1882	A Modern Instance. The first important American novel to deal realistically with divorce, the work describes the marital collapse of Bartley Hubbard, a newspaper editor given to drinking and philandering, and his wife, Marcia, characterized as irrational and passionate. The work receives mixed reviews, but the reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly declares the book "[Howells's] greatest achievement, not in an artistic [sense], but in an ethical apprehension."
1883	A Woman's Reason. Composed while Howells was traveling in Europe and judged as one of his weakest efforts, this novel concerns a woman trying to cope with life without a proper education.
1885	The Rise of Silas Lapham. Howells's novel is a realistic story of an ordinary man's rise to wealth and his family's attempts at joining Boston's elite social circles. Silas loses his affluence but gains morality when he refuses to participate in unethical business practices. The novel is particularly noteworthy for a scene in which Silas embarrasses himself at a dinner party by drinking too much. Although popular in its day, said to be read by one million people in the Century, some critics disparaged Howells's relentless realism. Modern critics consider it one of Howells's finest novels and among the best works of American fiction.
1886	Indian Summer. Howells considered this novel about a middle-aged man's misdirected love for a widow's young ward as among his best character studies. Mark Twain commends his friend's achievement by declaring, "You are really my only author." The novel has been judged as second only to The Rise of Silas Lapham as Howells's greatest achievement as a novelist.
1887	The Minister's Charge. In Howells's novel, a minister's excessive praise of a country boy's poetry encourages his literary aspirations, which are dashed. This is the first in a series of novels exploring what Howells calls a doctrine of "complicity," the responsibility one must take for one's actions and the principle that "no one for good or evil, for sorrow or joy, for sickness or health, stood apart from his fellows."
1888	Annie Kilburn. Howells's novel tells of a New England woman's haphazard attempts to save the citizens of her hometown from the negative social and economic effects of industrialism. Eventually she realizes that what the people truly need is justice. The story had been popular when first published in Harper's Magazine, and, concerning the book, Edward Everett Hale notes, "It is a pulpit indeed--to write such a book for a million readers." Howells also publishes April Hopes, treating the romantic complications between a young woman and her fiancé. It marks Howells's return to the comedy of manners after his focus on socially realistic problem novels.
1890	A Hazard of New Fortunes. Inspired by Tolstoy's War and Peace, Howells attempts his largest social canvas in this novel set in New York City, about a recently wealthy farmer who acquires a magazine. It is generally considered among Howells's most important novels. Howells also publishes The Shadow of a Dream, an experimental novel that offers a pre-Freudian exploration of the impact of dreams on three characters.
1890	A Boy's Town. This is the first volume (of three) providing an autobiographical account of the writer's life up to his departure for Italy in 1861. It would be followed by My Year in a Log Cabin (1893) and My Literary Passions (1895).
1891	Criticism and Fiction. Howells's most significant literary pronouncements are taken from his "The Editor's Study" columns in Harper's Magazine (1886-1891) and express his views on literary realism, naturalism, and the moral responsibilities of the writer. Additional critical volumes--Heroines of Fiction (1901) and Literature and Life (1902)--would follow.
1893	An Imperative Duty. Howells provides one of the first fictional treatments of the marriage between a white and a black. A young woman, raised as white, is shocked to learn that her grandmother was a slave, and the doctor who treats her overcomes his prejudice concerning her background and marries her. As a concession to popular prejudice, Howells sends his mixed-race couple to Italy to live. He also publishes The Quality of Mercy, a character study of an embezzler, and The World of Chance, a satire on publishing in which a young Midwestern newspaperman goes east to sell his novel.
1894	A Traveler from Altruria. Howells satirizes contemporary American life from the vantage point of a visitor from a utopian republic, who encounters, at a fashionable summer resort, a representative group of Americans, including a novelist, a banker, a lawyer, and a minister. A sequel, Through the Eye of the Needle, would follow in 1907.
1897	The Landlord at Lion's Head. One of Howells's better late novels, this character portrait presents the selfish, amoral, but likable scoundrel Jeff Durgin.
1899	Ragged Lady. Howells's novel is chiefly noteworthy for his final use of Italy as a setting. It treats a New England girl who goes to Venice to meet her future husband. Howells also publishes Their Silver Wedding Journey, reintroducing the Marches from his first novel, Their Wedding Journey (1872).
1902	The Kentons. In this quietly realistic novel, Howells depicts an Ohio family who travel to New York and Europe. Though Henry James praises the book as "miraculously felt and beautifully done," it fails to find an audience.
1903	Questionable Shapes. "The dean of American realism" collects three tales dealing with the supernatural. It would be followed in 1907 with Between the Dark and the Daylight, treating abnormal psychic states.
1904	The Son of Royal Langbrith. One of the best of Howells's later novels tells the story of a son's delusions about his dead father, who in reality was a scoundrel who tyrannized his wife. The novel presents the ethical dilemma of whether the son should learn the truth.
1913	New Leaf Mills. Howells's semi-autobiographical novel reflects his Midwestern boyhood.
1916	The Leatherwood God. Howells's final novel deals with the Ohio of his youth in the 1830s, a subject he also treats in a volume of reminiscences, Years of My Youth.
1920	The Vacation of the Kelwyns. Howells's final novel treats a family's encounter with the Shaker religious sect while vacationing on a farm. It shows the novelist's skill in presenting domestic scenes and is declared by critic Richard Chase as "quite possibly his best" novel.

Quotes:

"A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know he sees it."

"He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence."

"Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week."

"I know, indeed, of nothing more subtle satisfying and cheering than a knowledge of the real good will and appreciation of others. Such happiness does not come with money, nor does it flow from a fine physical state. It cannot be bought. But it is the keenest joy, after all; and the toiler's truest and best reward."

"Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself."

"An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise."

See more famous quotes by William Dean Howells

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