I love William Dean Howells.  He ran major magazines, read an enormous number of books in several languages, reviewed an enormous number of them, and published one or two books every year of his life.  This picture is from the one moment he ever relaxed.

Many of the people we think of as worth reading were first published by him during his tenure as an editor or first noticed by him as a critic or introduced to a mass audience by him–the Americans Henry James, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edward Eggleston, Bret Harte, Charles W. Chesnutt, Abraham Cahan, Edith Wharton, George Washington Cable, Ambrose Bierce, and Frank Norris, but also Tolstoy, Verga, Valdéz, Pérez Galdós, Ibsen, Zola, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Turgenev: the list goes on and on, and many of these people we might not still be reading without Howells–he was the only major critic writing favorably about Stephen Crane and Emily Dickinson, for instance.  No one remembers who he panned.

Tom Lutz