William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
Gilded Age Novelist, Editor & Critic, "The Dean of American Letters"
He was born in Ohio and pursuing a literary career went to Boston in early adulthood where he quickly became friends with the leading literary men of the day. Between 1861 and 1865 he was the U.S. Consul to Venice. Returning to America he settled at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was Editor (1871-81) of the Atlantic Monthly, the most respected magazine of the period. He was a prolific writer and after 1890 lived for the most part in New York City when his novels began to cover the political, philosophical and economic issues surrounding the Gilded Age. He was a mentor to a generation of younger writers (eg., Hamlin Garland and Stephen Crane) and his best-known novels included, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), A Traveler from Altruria (1894), and Christmas Every Day (1892) that was adapted into a 1996 film of the same name. On Christmas Eve, 1862, at the American Embassy in Paris he married Elinor Mead, sister of both the famous architect William Rutherford Mead (of the firm McKim, Mead & White) and the sculptor Larkin Goldsmith Mead. They had three children (listed).
