Howells, William Dean (1837-1920)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

William Dean Howells was born 1 March 1837 in Martinsville, Ohio; he died on 11 May 1920 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a progressive who engaged with the structural contradictions that produced the radical inequities of Gilded Age America, particularly the contradictions between laissez faire capitalism and the republican ideology of equality. Known as a supporter of civil rights, he famously defended abolitionists like John Brown after the raid on Harper's Ferry (1859) and the accused labor activists of the Haymarket Riot (1886). While the economic dynamics of his literary worlds dominate his writing, most relevant to ethical veganism is his sequence of utopian writings that began to appear in late 1892. Known as the Altrurian Romances, the first novel A Traveler from Altruria (1894) was originally serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine from November 1892 to October 1893. This was followed by a sequence of letters published in Cosmopolitan that became Letters of an Altrurian Traveler (1904), and finally Through the Eye of the Needle, which included reworked versions of the last six of the eleven “Letters,” was published in 1907.

The Altrurian utopia against which the US is measured  ̶  and found wanting  ̶  represents a veg*n Christian socialist utopia where food production and consumption is paradigmatic of social equality. In Altruria, women possess full equal rights and work alongside the men, everyone is educated and cultured, economic equality exists across social classes, and the values of equality and altruism attach to the treatment of species difference as well. Howells does this by attending to the ethical values that determine learned behaviors, like eating.

PUBLICATIONS