author
E. W. (Edgar Watson) Howe
1853–1937
A sharp-tongued small-town editor turned novelist, he built a national reputation from Kansas with plainspoken stories, essays, and famously barbed observations about American life. His writing could be funny, skeptical, and surprisingly modern all at once.
3 Audiobooks
The Story of a Country Town
by E. W. (Edgar Watson) Howe
The Mystery of the Locks
by E. W. (Edgar Watson) Howe
Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa
by E. W. (Edgar Watson) Howe
About the author
Born in Indiana in 1853, Edgar Watson Howe had little formal schooling after childhood and learned much of his trade through newspaper work. He began in printing and journalism in the 1870s, later settling in Atchison, Kansas, where he founded and edited the Atchison Globe and became one of the best-known newspaper voices in the region.
Howe also wrote fiction and essays. He is especially remembered for the novel The Story of a Country Town, which helped establish his literary reputation, and for E.W. Howe's Monthly, a magazine he wrote for many years. Readers were drawn to his direct style, dry humor, and unsentimental view of everyday people and institutions.
Over time, he became known as both a journalist and a man of aphorisms—someone who could sum up human nature in a line that was witty, bleak, or both. He died in 1937, but his work still offers a vivid picture of small-town America and the skeptical, observant mind behind it.