Produced by David Widger
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—Literary Boston As I Knew It
by William Dean Howells
Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when Iwent to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of theAtlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the SpringfieldRepublican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitanimportance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he wassuffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on thatnewspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more thanone hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery whichthis 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. Hewas always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a mostgratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. Hegave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of thefact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in thedestinies of the great literary periodical of New England.
I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliestnewspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in arefluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknownquality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely anyliterature 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 wasdistinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, thoughfrom the first it had been characterized by what was more national, whatwas more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chiefcontributors 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 NewEngland, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came apoem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard andMrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these,except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New Englandbirth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D.Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poetsfrom Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, hadappeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in NewYork, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solelyrepresented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock.It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, becamea figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. BretHarte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphedalmost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. MissConstance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James WhitcombRiley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, Mr.Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. HamlinGarland, all whom I name at random among other Western writers, were thenas unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss GraceKing, 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 discov