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Realizing “A Whole Order of Things”: E. W. Howe’s The Story of a Country Town

Praise has never been withheld from E. W. Howe’s novel of midwestern farm life, The Story of a Country Town. Upon its publication in 1883, personal copies were sent off to Mark Twain, who commended the obscure author for his “vivid” and “true” pictures of life, and to Howells, who admired the “unconscious fearlessness” with which the “grim truth” of the picture is represented.1 More recently this book has been called “the finest realistic picture of the small town produced in America before 1884” and the “first strong note of that long and bitter revolt from the American village.”2 The impact of Howe’s realism is so immediate that for us, as it surely must have been for earlier readers who went through twenty-five printings in two years, it “suggests the candid familiarity of an unretouched photograph.”3 One is at a loss, however, to discover from critics the exact sources of power in The Story of a Country Town. Howells’s observation that its strength lies in “the realization of a whole order of things”4 has been echoed by others who sense that a remarkable unity is somehow achieved from a multitude of plots, digressions, and undramatic narrative elements. According to John William Ward, for example, what holds the novel together is “the shaping force of the environment itself,” the presence of a pervading naturalism that succeeds almost in spite of Howe’s