It seems only yesterday that Lionel Trilling reported that he had created a sensation—in the cafeterias at Columbia University—by assigning to his students the work of William Dean Howells. What could Professor Trilling have conceivably found of interest—his students wanted to know—in this Victorian purveyor of old-fashioned realism in American fiction? Howells seemed too commonplace to be admitted to the company of Lawrence, Joyce, Proust, Mann, Kafka, and the other masters of modernist fiction.

The question was a pertinent one, which Trilling brilliantly answered in “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste” (1951). Anyone who takes the trouble to look up that essay—in The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism—will find a remarkable description of Howells’s concern with the quotidian and a defense of his central subject, the actualities of middle-class family life. Howells is important, Trilling argued, precisely because he concerned himself with the question of the heroic in relation to the ordinary problems of existence—like searching for a place to live, as Basil March does, at length, in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), or struggling with the problem of how to rear one’s children, as Silas and Persis do in The Rise of Silas Lapham(1885). Trilling observed that we do not find such life experience dealt with in the modernists because “the prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of the family.” And nowhere is this indifference to, or rejection of, the family, as a