Assuming for the moment that something called literary culture exists in the United States, where, exactly, might it be found today? From sea to shining sea, I suppose the answer is, but before putting one’s hat over one’s heart and finishing the song perhaps one would do well to ponder the significance of having to ask the question in the first place. Thirty, fifty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty years ago the question of where literary culture could be found would not need to have been raised, for the answer, though it might differ from time to time, was always evident.

The whereabouts of literary culture in August 1860 was certainly not a serious question for William Dean Howells. Then still a young newspaperman from Columbus, Ohio, Howells checked in at the Tremont Hotel in Boston. Howells had had four poems published in The Atlantic Monthly, and now had set himself up to see literary culture firsthand. Literary culture in 1860 meant Boston, where, as Edward Weeks put it in his recent memoirs, “most of the best writers in America lived within thirty miles of the Massachusetts State House.”

In Literary Friends and Acquaintances, Howells recalled what the literary culture of Boston looked and felt like. His first call was on James Russell Lowell, then the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who treated him with great kindness and gave him a note recommending him to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Lowell also set up a dinner for