The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells

Henry James (1843-1916) and William Dean Howells (1837-1920) are best known for the central roles they played as nineteenth-century American novelists, penning such classics as James’s Portrait of a Lady and Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham. Their importance as literary critics, however, has been underplayed for decades. Although certain aspects of James’s and Howells’s criticism have been carefully considered—James’s “Prefaces” and Howells’s Criticism and Fiction, for …