Ohio History Journal

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WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND THE

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND THE

ASHTABULA SENTINEL

 

By EDWIN HARRISON CADY

 

Few facts about the formative years of William Dean How-

ells are known except what the author himself left in the form of

personal reminiscence. Books such as A Boy's Town, My Literary

Passions, My Year in a Log Cabin, and Years of My Youth are

mellow and interesting autobiography. Mildred Howells' Life in

Letters of her father contains a few early letters and two reveal-

ing photographs. The amount of objective evidence, however,

concerning his all-important first twenty-one years in Ohio is

slight, although the sources of his literary enthusiasm and con-

cerns for realism, socialism and gentility must be sought in the

years of his Ohio youth as much as in the literary friends and

acquaintances of Cambridge and the crude hazards of new fortunes

of the "Gilded Age." One reservoir of intimate evidence has

hitherto been untapped. It is the newspaper which the Howells

family owned and published in Jefferson, Ohio, for more than

forty years, the Ashtabula Sentinel.1

The influence of this newspaper on young Howells was im-

portant. From his fifteenth year to his twentieth he worked on

it as a compositor and occasional contributor. The office was his

daily environment, and it took the place of formal schooling al-

most completely. There his early attitudes and angles of vision

were determined. The impetus to write and study literature was

quickened there daily as he heard the printers recite and pun and

argue. The taste which appropriated writings from other unpro-

tected publications informed and molded his style, providing

models for him to imitate or shun. The columns of the Ashta-

bula Sentinel mirror all these factors. They hold, too, many of

 

1 Bound files preserved in the Ashtabula Public Library, Ashtabula, Ohio,

39