Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe

Background

Howe was born in Bristol, R. I. in 1864, the son of the Right Reverend Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe, Episcopal bishop of central Pennsylvania, who had eighteen children by three wives, and of Eliza Whitney. Howe grew up in Pennsylvania.

Education

He attended Selwyn Hall, in Reading. After graduating in 1886 from Lehigh University, he did graduate work in English at Harvard, where he received a second B. A. with the class of 1887, and an M. A. in 1888.

Career

Howe settled in Boston, where he became associate editor of the Youth's Companion; in 1893 he joined Houghton Mifflin as associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He came to know such older literary figures as Annie Adams Fields and Julia Ward Howe, and was the friend of such diverse contemporaries as Charles Townsend Copeland, Robert A. Woods, and Louis D. Brandeis. Howe's first book of verses, Rari nantes (1892), was published by the Merrymount Press in Boston. In 1895, when Howe's eyesight began to fail, he returned to Bristol, R. I. , where for nearly five years he farmed the family property.

When Howe's sight improved in 1899, he returned to Boston. His post at the Atlantic having been filled, he returned to the Youth's Companion until 1913. He edited the Harvard Alumni Bulletin from 1913 to 1919 and the Harvard Graduates' Magazine in 1917-1919. Thereafter he spent a decade as editor of the books published by the Atlantic Monthly. Howe fully agreed with Dr. Johnson's dictum "Sir, the biographical part of literature is what I love most. " While still farming at Bristol, he wrote a series of short biographical sketches for the Bookman that were reprinted in 1898 as American Bookmen. He persuaded the Boston publishing house of Small, Maynard and Company to undertake, under his editorship, a series entitled Beacon Biographies, little books of about twenty thousand words each. Thirty-one volumes were eventually published. For this series he wrote Phillips Brooks (1899).

Howe dreamed of a twenty-volume American counterpart of the Dictionary of National Biography, but was dashed when he could get no encouragement from publishers for the proposal. When, two decades later, the American Council of Learned Societies undertook the Dictionary of American Biography, he became a willing contributor. Despite the demands of his editorial work, Howe wrote many full-length biographies, including those of George Bancroft (1908), George von L. Meyer (1919), Annie Adams Fields (1923), Barrett Wendell (1924), James Ford Rhodes (1929), Moorfield Storey (1932), John Jay Chapman (1937), and Oliver Wendell Holmes (1939). A brief autobiography, A Venture in Remembrance, appeared in 1941. Howe also edited letters of General W. T. Sherman (1909), Charles Eliot Norton (with Sara Norton; 1913), James Russell Lowell (1932), ladies of the Quincy family (The Articulate Sisters; 1946), and Francis James Child and James Russell Lowell (The Scholar-Friends; 1952, with G. W. Cottrell, Jr. ).

In 1920-1924 he edited five volumes of Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany, for which he personally wrote 234 sketches. In 1903 Howe published Boston, the Place and the People. He wrote the history of many local institutions – Boston Common (1910), the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1914), the Massachusetts Humane Society (1918), the Atlantic Monthly (1919), the Tavern Club (1934)--as well as a book on his native Bristol (1930). When past eighty he collaborated with the photographer Samuel Chamberlain on Boston Landmarks (1946) and Who Lived Here? (1952). He published eight volumes of verse.

Howe was vice-president of the Atlantic Monthly Company from 1911 to 1929. After he retired from that post, he spent two years in Washington as consultant on biography at the Library of Congress. In 1932 he was a visiting scholar at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. For a Rhode Islander who had grown up in Pennsylvania, Howe had become a very complete Bostonian. He was a vestryman of Trinity Church; he became a trustee of the Boston Athenaeum in 1906 and of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1918; and he was an overseer of Harvard in 1925-1931 and 1933 -1939.

In 1933, when Charles Knowles Bolton retired as librarian of the Boston Athenaeum, the obvious candidate for his successor was Elinor Gregory. To solve the problem of appointing a woman, Howe agreed to assume nominal responsibility for the library by accepting the new post of director, with Gregory as librarian. In 1937 he quietly resigned the superfluous post and returned to his place among the trustees.

Through his seventies and eighties Howe lived in an apartment on Louisburg Square and spent much time at the Athenaeum, Symphony Hall, Trinity Church, the Tavern Club, the Club of Odd Volumes, and Harvard. In the summer he went to Bristol. The unquestioned dean of Boston letters, Howe died at Cambridge.

Achievements

• Besides editing The Memory of Lincoln (1889), Home Letters of General Sherman (1909), The Beacon Biographies (31 volumes, 1899–1910), and Lines of Battle and Other Poems by Henry Howard Brownell (1912), he published the following: Shadows (1897); American Bookmen (1898); Phillips Brooks (1899); Boston: The Place and People (1903); Life and Letters of George Bancroft (1908); Harmonics: A Book of Verse (1909); Boston Common: Scenes from Four Centuries (1910); Life and Labors of Bishop Hare, Apostle to the Sioux (1911); Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (1813), with Sara Norton; The Boston Symphony Orchestra (1914); The Harvard Volunteers in Europe (1916); The Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1918); The Atlantic Monthly and Its Makers (1919); George von Lengerke Meyer, his Life and Public Services (1919); Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War against Germany two volumes, (1920, 1921); Who Lived Here? (1952).

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Partial (and Not Impartial) Semi-Centennial History of the Tavern Club, 1884-1934 (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from A Partial (and Not Impartial) Semi-Centennia...)

  • The Harvard Volunteers in Europe; Personal Records of Experience in Military, Ambulance, and Hospital Service

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Boston, the Place and the People

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Phillips Brooks

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The Life and Letters of George Bancroft

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The Boston Symphony Orchestra: An Historical Sketch

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The Memory of Lincoln

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • A Great Private Citizen, Henry Lee Higginson

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Politics

Howe called himself an "unrepentant liberal. "

Connections

After a protracted courtship he married Fanny Huntington Quincy on September 21, 1899. They had three children: Quincy, journalist and radio commentator; Helen Huntington (Mrs. Alfred Reginald Allen), monologist and writer; and Mark De Wolfe, Harvard law professor and legal historian.

Father:

Right Reverend Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe

Mother:

Eliza Whitney

Spouse:

Fanny Huntington Quincy

Daughter:

Helen Huntington

Son:

Quincy Howe

1900–1977

Son:

Mark DeWolfe Howe

1906–1967

References

• Gentle Americans 1864-1960, The: Biography of a Breed