The Man of Letters as a Man of Business — A Closer Reading

The Writer’s Confession of Faith

Howells’s prefatory note admits that the papers may appear “a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable relation to one another.” Yet he hopes the reader will sense an inner solidarity. This is a crucial formal clue: the essay’s structure mirrors its subject—the messy, contingent life of a working writer. Howells’s voice is intimate, almost apologetic, as he explains his lifelong habit of seeing poetry in the poor or common thing, provided it reveals “an intrinsic poetry” and puts on phrases that clothe it pleasingly to the imagination. He quotes Wordsworth’s “My heart leaps up” to claim the rainbow as his emblem: “I have seldom seen a sky without some bit of rainbow in it.” The passage is both a credo and a subtle defense of realism, grounding aesthetic preference in personal temperament rather than abstract theory.

Women as the Gatekeepers of Print

Howells devotes a striking passage to the role of women in the literary marketplace. He asserts that women “read the most books” and are “far better educated, for the most part, than our men.” Their tastes, he says, are decisive: “it is useless to quarrel with their decisions, for there is no appeal from them.” The author of light or solid literature must resign himself to obscurity unless the ladies choose to recognize him. Yet he cautions that favor is impossible to forecast: “Who could prophesy it for another, who guess it for himself?” He notes that humorists—whom women are said not to like—sometimes reach the first rank without female help, rising through newspapers. The observation is less a complaint than a cool-eyed assessment of the market’s sociology, grounded in the specific reading habits of late-nineteenth-century America.

Journalism’s Ambivalent Embrace

Howells turns to the relationship between journalism and literature, a subject he knows from experience. He speculates that most journalists would have been literary men if they could, and that their kindness to young authors springs from “self-pity they feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors.” Once an author is established, however, journalists often turn hostile, resenting his “unhallowed gains.” Howells dryly notes the public’s amusement at the disparity between a novelist’s ten thousand dollars and Milton’s five pounds for Paradise Lost. He does not defend the sums; he concedes that the gains are unhallowed. But he points out the inconsistency: popular ministers receive large salaries without ridicule. The passage is a model of Howells’s method—personal, anecdotal, and quietly subversive of received pieties about art and money.

The Pecuniary Paradox of Letters

Throughout the essay, Howells returns to the central tension: literature is supposed to be above commerce, yet authors must eat. He refuses to pretend the problem does not exist. His tone is pragmatic, not cynical. He notes that the public expects authors to be poor and finds something droll in their prosperity. The essay’s title itself is a provocation—it yokes two identities usually kept separate. Howells does not resolve the paradox; he explores its contours with a mixture of irony and resignation. His own position as a successful editor and novelist gives him authority to speak, but he never claims to have solved the riddle. Instead, he offers a series of observations that, taken together, form a portrait of the literary life as it was actually lived in the Gilded Age.

Howells’s essay rewards readers who enjoy watching a practiced mind think on the page. It is not a polemic or a manifesto but a conversation—with himself, with the reader, with the ghosts of Milton and Wordsworth. The best approach is to read slowly, noting how each anecdote or aside contributes to the larger argument about the dignity and difficulty of making art in a commercial society. The essay’s loose structure is deliberate; its digressions are part of its meaning.

That rainy afternoon, I kept returning to Howells’s quiet fury about how artists are forced to price their souls. The very idea of “economy” in writing felt cold, yet his honesty was warm. Afterwards, I drifted into another collection, almost by instinct—Modern Essays — Context and Discussion—where the same uneasy negotiation between thought and livelihood seemed to whisper through entirely different voices.