LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Literary Boston As I Knew It

by William Dean Howells



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT

Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I
went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the
Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield
Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan
importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was
suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that
newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than
one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which
this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived,
though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. He
was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most
gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. He
gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of the
fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the
destinies of the great literary periodical of New England.




I.

I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest