William Dean Howells was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright, he was nicknamed “The dean of American letters”. William Dean Howells was born on March 1, 1837, in Martinsville, Ohio to William Cooper, and Mary Dean. He was the second of eight children. His father worked as a newspaper editor and printer which he moved frequently around Ohio. The family settled in Hamilton Ohio where his father oversaw a Whig newspaper and followed Swedenborgians they lived there for nine years which was the longest they would stay in one spot. William began helping his father with some of his stuff from work which was typesetting and printing work at a young age. In 1852, his father put one of Williams’s poems in the Ohio State journal