Years of My Youth

BY W. D. HOWELLS WITH INTRODUCTION AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN EXPRESSLY FOR THIS BOOK BY CLIFTON JOHNSON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON Years of My Youth Copyright, 1916, 1917, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America Published October, 1917 K-R
WHENEVER I visit the region of a famous man’s youth I have the feeling that I ought to discover there some clue to the secret of his greatness; for I cannot help fancying that the environment must have molded him and been an essential element in the development of his individuality and power. It was with such expectations that I recently went to Ohio, just as spring was verging into summer, to see the land where Mr. Howells spent the years of which he has made so frank and appealing a record in this volume. In the middle of the last century the State retained much of the crude primitiveness of the frontier, and I wondered what stimulus this could have offered in creating a genius so broad in his views and so sensitive to impressions, and in whose expression there is such fine imagination, humor, sympathy, and wisdom.
I began my journey in Mr. Howells’s native State where he began his life’s journey eighty years ago, at Martin’s Ferry. The place is two miles up the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia, on the western bank of the stream. By the water-side are big, ugly factories belching smoke and steam, and in their vicinity are railroad tracks, cinders, and other litter, and dingy, ramshackle buildings, among which are numerous forlorn little dwellings and occasional saloons. A sort of careless prosperity is in evidence, but not much of the charm of neatness, or concern for appearances. The rest of the town overspreads the steep slopes that border the river, and pushes back into the nooks among the adjacent upheaval of big hills. It is rather chaotic, but improves in quality the farther it recedes from the smoke and din of the manufacturing strip along the river.