(The Story of a Country Town is both a pioneering triumph ...)
The Story of a Country Town is both a pioneering triumph of realistic fiction and a landmark in the development of American literature. This novel represents a retreat from the nineteenth-century romantic image of rural life in the American Midwest.
Edgar Watson Howe was an American editor and author. He was a contributor to periodicals, including Country Gentleman, Saturday Evening Post, American Magazine, and Rotarian.
Background
Edgar Watson Howe was born on May 3, 1853, in Treaty, Indiana, United States. He was the son of Henry Howe, a schoolteacher, Methodist preacher, abolitionist, and newspaper owner, and Elizabeth (Irwin) Howe.
Howe spent most of his childhood in Harrison County, Missouri, where his family moved when he was 3, first to Fairview, and then to Bethany around 1864.
Education
Howe received his early education in common school. Much of his education he acquired while learning and practicing the printer's trade, and he eventually became a journalist.
Career
Howe began to work as a printer at the age of eleven. Howe’s father deserted the family when Howe was thirteen, at which point the boy was forced to make his way in the world as a tramp printer in the Midwest. Howe worked where he could for many years, eventually settling in Golden, Colorado. There, in 1873, he became the publisher and editor of the Golden Globe. Then, Howe poured his energies and ideas into the paper, called The Atchison Globe. Howe focused on local news and plain talk, but the paper was not an immediate success.
In 1882, following a visit from his father, Howe began to write a novel reflecting the grim lessons he took from his rotten life. After the daily grind of turning out a local newspaper, Howe would sit in his kitchen to write a novel about the heartland. The Story of a Country Town is a product of angry night hours. He sent the book to a number of publishers on the East coast, but all rejected it, so he published the book himself, running 1,500 copies on his newspaper press.
Once the novel became a success, Howe’s life became much easier. He published several more novels - none of which matched his early success - and composed notes on the travel his success afforded him. Toward the end of his life, Howe gave up the Atchison Globe, though he continued to publish his opinions in E. W. Howe’s Weekly, a magazine he owned and edited. He also published his autobiography, Plain People (1929), which impressed critics with its bracing depression.
Once Howe was a success, his cranky commentary on human life seemed wise and straight-shooting to many critics. Howe became famous for his gritty, aphoristic remarks, and was hailed as “The Sage of Potato Hill.” A smattering of his maxims, as quoted by Bucco, will give one a sense of Howe’s general style and philosophies. Howe also counted himself the eternal enemy of unions, prohibitionists, suffragists, farmers, preachers, and a host of others. He was none too fond of women, and seemed doubtful of love’s existence.
Quotations:
"A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice."
"If you go-slow others will overtake you; if you go fast, you will exhaust your strength and die young."
"Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies."
"Express a mean opinion of yourself occasionally; it will show your friends that you know how to tell the truth."
"If you don't learn to laugh at trouble, you won't have anything to laugh at when you're old."
"Many people would be more truthful were it not for their uncontrollable desire to talk."
"Men have as exaggerated an idea of their rights as women have of their wrongs."
"Most people have seen worse things in private than they pretend to be shocked at in public."
"No man would listen to you talk if he didn't know it was his turn next."
"When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it."
Personality
Following the marriage, Howe learned that he was not his wife’s, Clara Frank, first lover; Martin Bucco, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, suggested that this left him “embittered.” Eugene Howe, Howe’s youngest son, once called Howe “the most wretchedly unhappy man I ever knew,” according to William J. McReynolds in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Indeed, Howe’s disappointments were at the heart of his writing, and he formed a successful career from his bitterness. Much of Howe’s writing reflects on the whininess of women who are not satisfied with the homemaker’s role, and certainly he was no friend to marriage laws. His relationship with Frank ended in 1901, when he moved into a shack in the family yard so that his wife could be granted a divorce on the grounds of desertion.
Quotes from others about the person
“Howe had an astonishing repertory of prejudices, and he was famous for his blunt exposition of them, often expressed with laconic humor. He enjoyed his role as debunker and iconoclast, and he counted himself the eternal enemy of phonies.” - McReynolds
“In keeping with the honesty of his mind is his stark, unpolished style. Sentences come out as he thinks and would utter them; jerky, forceful, colorful. He splits his infinitives with glorious abandon and leaves his prepositions wherever they happen to land. The result is a ruggedness, exasperating were it not so natural.”
Connections
In 1874, Howe married Clara Frank, but they divorced in 1901. They had five children - James, Mateel, Eugene, two others.