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 Susan Goodman, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, has received a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship that will allow her to take a year to finish her most recent book, a biography of William Dean Howells.
Howells, who wrote more than 100 books including novels, poems, plays, literary criticism and travelogues, is perhaps best known for his tenure as editor of The Atlantic Monthly (1871-81), where he was able to exert tremendous influence on American’s literary scene, Goodman said. Known as the dean of American Literature, he discovered and published such literary giants as Mark Twain and introduced American readers to the likes of Henry James and Tolstoy. He later wrote the influential “Editor’s Easy Chair” column for Harpers.
Known primarily as an Edith Wharton scholar, Goodman said she was drawn to Howells because he helped to shape American literature as we know it today.
“Howells’ father was a newspaperman who had his son setting type by the time he was 9 years old,” she said. “The family held quasi-Quaker beliefs and lived for a year in a commune.
“In his early twenties,” she said, “Howells published a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln and used his earnings to travel to New England where legend has it he was immediately accepted into a circle of authors that included William Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Oliver Wendell Holmes.”
Because of his political connections, Howells was appointed counsel to Venice during the Civil War and lived in Italy for several years. His travel book, “Venetian Life,” was well received and helped establish his reputation.
His novel, “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” was required reading in high schools for many years, Goodman said.
For her book, Goodman will continue to conduct research at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Houghton Library at Harvard and at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y., where there is a significant collection of Howells’ correspondence with his family.
Additionally, some of Howells’ heirs are still alive, and Goodman has visted a great-grandson, William White Howells, a retired professor who lives with his wife of 70-years in Kittery Point, Maine.
Goodman earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of New Hampshire and held her first academic job at Fresno State. She join the University of Delaware eight years ago and teaches American literature.
Her other books include “Ellen Glasgow: A Biography” (1999), “Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle” (1994) and “Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals” (1990). She has coedited two volumes of essays, “Edith Wharton: A Forward Glance” (1999) and “Femmes de Conscience: Aspects du Feminisme Americain, 1848-1875.” Next spring, John Hopkins University Press will publish her book, entitled "Civil Wars: American Novelists and Manners," which includes chapters on Wharton, Howells, Henry James, Willa Cather, Glasgow and Jessie Fauset.
Of her early interest in Wharton, she said, “I like the kind of worlds she creates—worlds that have rules, even though they always get broken– and worlds with rich descriptions of interiors that reflect the characters. There’s something very appealing about someone who has a reverence for words.”
May 8, 2002
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