[6] He began at an early age to help his father with typesetting and printing work, a job known at the time as a printer's devil.

In 1858, he began to work at the Ohio State Journal, where he wrote poetry and short stories, and also translated pieces from French, Spanish, and German.

But his relationship with journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison was more important for the development of his literary style and his advocacy of Realism.

[9] Howells gave a series of twelve lectures on "Italian Poets of Our Century" for the Lowell Institute during its 1870–71 season.

His social views were also strongly represented in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), and An Imperative Duty (1891).

However, he frequently encouraged new writers in whom he discovered new ideas or new fictional techniques, such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Harold Frederic, Abraham Cahan, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

[15] Howells and his daughter Mildred decided to spend part of the year in their Cambridge home on Concord Avenue; though, without Elinor, they found it "dreadful in its ghostliness and ghastliness".

In addition to his own creative works, Howells wrote criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Giovanni Verga, Benito Pérez Galdós, and, especially, Leo Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputations in the United States.

He also wrote critically in support of American writers Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles W. Chesnutt, Abraham Cahan, Madison Cawein, and Frank Norris.

In defense of the real, as opposed to the ideal, he wrote, I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always 'has the standard of the arts in his power,' will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not 'simple, natural, and honest,' because it is not like a real grasshopper.

"[30] The late 19th-century English novelist George Gissing read two of Howells's works, The Shadow of a Dream and A Fearful Responsibility, calling the latter "inane triviality".

[31] Bliss Perry considered a knowledge of his work vital for an understanding of the American provincial novel and believed that "he has never in his long career written an insincere, a slovenly, or an infelicitous page.

He wrote various types of works, including fiction, poetry, and farces, of which The Sleeping Car, The Mouse-Trap, The Elevator; Christmas Every Day; and Out of the Question are characteristic.