Criticism and Fiction

What fiction is for, argued by the man who could make or break an American novelist: against romance, against the picturesque, in favour of the ordinary and the true. Howells edited The Atlantic and wrote for Harper's, and used both to push American writing towards realism; this 1891 book is the manifesto, it made him enemies for life, and every argument in it is still being had. Fifty-eight plates of American painting, from Catskill landscapes by Cropsey to Bierstadt, show the plain native scenery Howells wanted fiction to claim.