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William Dean Howells democracy at work when james t. fields offered William Dean Howells twenty-five hundred dollars a year to be his assistant, Howells held out for another five dollars a week. He found it disquieting that Fields, who had rejected sections of his Venetian Life (1866), chiefly showed interest in his proofreading skills. He also knew that the Atlantic maintained an onerous standard of perfection : proofs went from the head reader to the editor, who checked every fact. If possible, they passed next to the author, then back to the editor , who accepted or rejected emendations before sending them on to the printer, the head reader, the editor again, the stereotyper (who made the plates), and finally back to the head reader for any corrections. But after consulting with James Russell Lowell, who brushed aside his reservations, Howells accepted Fields’s proposal with the stipulation that he would succeed Fields as editor in chief. The Atlantic had long been his bible, just as Boston had been his desired destination. In Literary Friends and Acquaintance, he wrote: “At Boston chiefly, if not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life. . . . Every young writer was ambitious to join his name with theirs in The Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor & Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business world has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a warrant of quality to the reader and 11 Perhaps you are permanently engaged at “The Nation” bureau, and dont wish a Boston or Cambridge life, and it may be your present emolument is larger than I could offer you for the place to be filled in our establishment. . . . If you care to come East let me know, and tell me what salary will content you. james t. fields to W. D. Howells, 11 January 1866 r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 88 ] of immortality to the author, so that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day I should now be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame.”1 His wife Elinor proved less enthusiastic about his leaving the Nation , a progressive weekly edited by the brilliant if bellicose E. L. Godkin (and still in business today), which promised, in its prospectus, to “wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.” Elinor’s reasons lay elsewhere. “It does seem retrograding,” she wrote her father-inlaw , “to go from New York to Boston.”2 Howells’s life had, in a sense, been pointing to the moment he joined the Atlantic’s staff. Certain in his twenties that he would be a poet, he had banked his future on an Atlantic acceptance and used all his ready cash to make his way to Lowell’s doorstep. Lowell had looked him over, plied him with Madeira, and passed him on to Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau . At the now legendary Parker House dinner, Oliver Wendell Holmes turned to Lowell with “sweet and caressing irony” and said of his friend’s protégé: “Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.”3 The succession had to wait. During the Civil War, Howells served his country as consul at Venice—a plum received for having written a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln. Returning to the United States, he accepted the job with the Nation. At a New Year’s Eve party given by Bayard Taylor, an Atlantic travel writer with Ohio roots, he became reacquainted with Fields. Ten days later, Fields offered him the job. Howells brought to the magazine his extensive experience as a journalist . Instead of Harvard, he attended a “university of the streets,” where he saw a poverty of the spirit far more disheartening than any material disadvantages his family had known in backwoods Ohio. It made him want literature to speak for its time and place, even if that meant making poetry less “literary” and journalism more so.4 Howells brought a unique perspective to the country’s leading literary magazine. To him, nothing characterized the Atlantic more than its roots in New England Puritanism , and this he thought neither relevant nor vital to the new New England . In one of his most insightful criticisms of the region, he wrote: “The novel is a picture in which...

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