Famous Authors (Men). E. F. Harkins
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E. F. Harkins
Famous Authors (Men)
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066234560
Table of Contents
PREFACE
The aim of this book is to present to the reading public sketches of some of its American literary heroes. There are heroes young and old; but in literature, especially, age has little to do with favorites. At the same time, it will be noted that the subjects of these sketches occupy places in or near the centre of the literary stage. The lately dead, like Maurice Thompson; the hero of the last generation, like Edward Everett Hale; the young man who has made his first successful flight—these do not come within the scope of the present work. So, if some reader miss his favorite, let him understand that at least there was no malice in the exclusion.
A part of the aim has been to present the social or personal as well as the professional side of the authors. Many of the anecdotes commonly told of well-known novelists are apocryphal or imaginary. Care, therefore, has been taken to separate the wheat from the chaff. Wherever it was possible, preference has been given the statements of the authors themselves.
The sketches are arranged chronologically, that is, in the order of the authors' first publications. No other arrangement, indeed, would seem fair among so gifted and popular a company, writing for a public that discriminates while it encourages and enjoys.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Mr. Howells has reached that point of life and success where he can afford to sit down and look back. But he is not that sort of man. He will probably continue to work and to look forward until, in the words of Hamlet, he shuffles off this mortal coil.
William Dean Howells was born in Martin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio, March 1, 1837. He has therefore reached the ripe age of sixty-four. When he was three years old his father moved from Martin's Ferry to Hamilton and bought The Intelligencer, a weekly paper. Nine years afterward he sold The Intelligencer and moved to Dayton, becoming proprietor of the Dayton Transcript. This paper had been a semi-weekly, but Mr. Howells changed it to a daily; and his son William went to work for him. It was William's business to rise at four in the morning and sell the paper about town. But the Transcript proved a failure, so the Howells family left Dayton and moved into the country on the banks of the Miami, where for a year a log-cabin was their home.
Mr. Howells tells a characteristic story of those struggling days, "When I was a boy," he said some years ago, "I worked on my father's paper. Among other things, I set type. Those were days of great struggle for all of us. The paper was not profitable, and ours was a large family. My tastes and ambitions were all literary, and I wanted to write a story. Instead of writing it and then setting it up in type, I composed it at the case and put it in type as I invented it. We printed a chapter of it weekly in the paper, and so it was published as fast as I got it up. I tried to get three or four chapters ready in advance, but I could not do it. All I could possibly accomplish was to have one installment ready every time the paper went to press. This went on for a long while, and that story became a burden to me. It stretched out longer and longer, but I could see no way to end it. Every week I resolved that that story should be finished in the next week's paper; every week it refused to be finished. Finally I became positively panic stricken, and ended it somehow or other. The experience discouraged me to some extent. I made up my mind that I could not invent."
In 1851, when William was fourteen, the family moved from the country to Columbus, where his father got employment as a clerk in the House of Representatives, and also as a compositor on the Ohio State Journal. William went to work as a reporter on the Journal. Five years later he became the Columbus correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette. In 1859 he took the position of news editor of the Ohio State Journal. Later that same year Howells senior, from whom the son evidently inherited his industry and ambition, bought the Ashtabula Sentinel and transferred the property to Jefferson, whither the family moved. William took the position of subeditor of the Sentinel.
From time to time poems by young Howells had appeared in the Ohio newspapers. Some of his verses, too, had even been published by The Atlantic Monthly. In 1860, in collaboration with John J. Piatt, he published his first volume of verse—"Poems by Two Friends." In 1860, also, Howells's "Life of Abraham Lincoln" was published. With the earnings of this immediately popular work our author journeyed to the East by way of Canada. In Boston he first met James Russell Lowell, who was then