The Atlantic was founded in Boston, by New Englanders. But within its first decade, the magazine had hired an ambitious young assistant editor, William Dean Howells, who was proud of his origins “beyond the Alleghenies”—his shorthand for the rest of the country at the time.             

Howells left his home state of Ohio after educating himself and had a worldly career. In his voluminous works as a best-selling novelist, a literary critic, an editor, and a civic crusader, he expressed an ever-keener awareness that “the American idea” could be realized only through ongoing struggle for social, economic, regional, racial, and gender-based inclusion and justice.               

He was a Christian, a socialist, and an abolitionist. In 1860, at age 23, he wrote a popular campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his mid-career prime as “the dean of American letters,” he marched in support of women’s suffrage; denounced the rush-to-judgment conviction of anarchists and labor activists for the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago; and, like his friend Mark Twain, opposed U.S. control of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, as a prominent member of the American Anti-Imperialist League.              

In his youth, Howells made his name standing with the abolitionists and against slavery and secession. In his late maturity, he closed his career as one of the founders of the NAACP, standing with W. E. B. Du Bois against the spread of Jim Crow laws and racist violence.