Positive Quiddity: Edgar Watson Howe

Edgar Watson Howe (May 3, 1853 – October 3, 1937), sometimes referred to as E. W. Howe, was an American novelist and newspaper and magazine editor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was perhaps best known for his magazine, E.W. Howe's Monthly. Howe was well traveled and known for his sharp wit in his editorials.

Early Life and Career
Howe was born in 1853 in Wabash County, Indiana, in a community now known as Treaty. He is known to have begun his journalistic career as far back as March 22, 1873, when as a 19-year-old he came to Golden, Colorado, from Platte City, Nebraska, and partnered with William F. Dorsey to acquire the Golden Eagle newspaper. Renaming it the Golden Globe, it was the second main newspaper of Golden and served a Republican readership and political bent. Howe, who took over complete ownership by the end of the year, quickly gained a sharp-witted editorial reputation in the community that would preview his national fame.

Within a couple of years Howe sold the Globe to his brother A.J. Howe and partner William Grover Smith, and moved to Falls City, Nebraska in 1875, where he established a new Globe newspaper, affectionately called the "Little Globe". In 1875 he merged this with the Nemaha Valley Journal and it became the Globe-Journal.

In 1877 Howe established and edited the Atchison, Kansas, newspaper Globe (Atchison Daily
Globe), which he continued for twenty-five years, retiring in 1911. Having been raised Methodist, he described himself as identifying with Methodism but is essentially a cultural Christian, according to his writing. Howe's most famous novel is The Story of a Country Town. A 1919 edition of his Ventures in Common Sense featured a foreword by celebrated American writer (and cynic) H.L. Mencken.

Howe died in 1937, at the age of 84, near Atchison.

Works

• The Story of a Country Town
(1883)

The Mystery of the Locks

(1885)

The Moonlight Boy

(1900)

Daily Notes of a Trip Around the World

The Trip to the West Indies

Country Town Sayings: A collection of paragraphs from the Atchison Globe

(1911)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._W._Howe#Works
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Note from the Blog Author
Country Town Sayings has been reprinted recently. It is full of dense, tight, unique common sense as well as being easy to read. His cryptic notes in the Atchison Globe newspaper are collected here and form almost a small town American version of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims. Recommended.