William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 - May 11, 1920) was an American novelist, short story writer, literary critic, magazine editor, and mentor who wrote for various magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and the Harper's Magazine. He played an essential role in shaping the American literary sensibility of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the shift toward naturalism and realism.
Howells' Criticism and Fiction, published in 1891, is a closely argued manifesto for American realism.
«Bad criticism is mischievous enough, and I think that much if not most current criticism as practised among the English and Americans is bad, is falsely principled, and is conditioned in evil. It is falsely principled because it is unprincipled, or without principles; and it is conditioned in evil because it is almost wholly anonymous. At the best its opinions are not conclusions from certain easily verifiable principles, but are effects from the worship of certain models».