The year 1860 was a predictably good one for William Dean Howells, an up-and-coming man of letters from Ohio. In the four years prior, Howells had been elected as a clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives and took up an editorial post at Ohio State Journal. In 1860, he completed a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln and acquired a consulship in Venice, but perhaps more important than either of these considerable achievements was Howells’s pilgrimage to his “holy land”: Boston.
Residing within that famed and fabled city, the seat of New England’s industrial and political power, were all those whom Howells admired. Luminaries like Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James all lived in Boston, the literary epicenter that Howells had adored from afar. While visiting, James Russell Lowell—then the editor of The Atlantic Monthly—invited Howells to dine with him and two other friends of The Atlantic, James T. Fields (the publisher) and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (a frequent contributor). As Howells would later write to his father, at that dinner both Lowell and Holmes “took [him] by the hands,” a de facto acceptance of Howells—a twenty-three-year-old journalist from “the west,” Ohio—into New England’s literati.
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