Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1977
Abstract
Edgar Watson Howe’s quaint niche in American literary history rests squarely on his first and best novel, The Story of a Country Town (1882). In 1856 the infant Howe and his parents trekked West, "to grow up with the country.” But unlike the early work of Bret Harte, Edward Eggleston, and Mark Twain, Howe’s Country Town blasted the Jeffersonian garden with the raw winds of Darwinism and Necessity and stressed Western drabness and tragic failure. His early hardships on the land, in printshops, and at home informed both his grim fiction and his country-town journalism. Before he became celebrated in America and abroad as the “Country-Town Philosopher," the “Kansas Diogenes,” and the "Sage of Potato Hill," this ambivalent editor-novelist had anticipated not only young Hamlin Garland’s bleak Middle Border and old Mark Twain’s “damned human race,” but also twentieth-century American literary Naturalism and the obliquity of the modern psyche.
Recommended Citation
Bucco, Martin. E.W. Howe. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1977. Digital. Western Writers Series, 26.