The father satisfied his literary longings by editing country newspapers and serving as reporter at various times at the State capital during sessions of the legislature. He remained in no place long. With what Howells has called "the vagarious impulse which is so strong in our craft," he removed his family to new fields of labor with surprising regularity. There was little chance for schooling. Almost from infancy the boy was a part of his father's printing office. In _A Boy's Town_, that delightful autobiographic fragment told in the third person, he has given a glimpse of this early period:
My boy was twelve years old by that time and was already a swift compositor, though he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair to reach the case in setting type on Tyler's inaugural message. But what he lacked in stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got the name of "The Old Man" from the printers as soon as he began to come about the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His first attempt in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or seventh year; and the printing office was in some sort his home, as well as his school, his university. He could no more remember learning to set type than he could remember learning to read.
The autobiographical writings of Howells leave us with the impression of a gentle, contemplative boy given rather to reading and dreaming in a solitary corner than to Mark-Twain-like activities with Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns. Though by birth and rearing he was a complete Westerner of the river section, mingling freely with all its elements, he seems never to have taken root in the region or to have been much influenced by it. He has spoken somewhere of De Quincey as a man "eliminated from his time and place by his single love for books." Howells, like James, was a detached soul. From his earliest youth he was not a resident of Ohio, but a resident of the vaster world of literature. He read enormously and with passion, and from his boyhood he seems--also like Henry James--to have had no dream of other than a literary career. He saw not the headlong West that surged about him but the realms of poetry and romance. "To us who have our lives so largely in books," he wrote in later years, "the material world is always the fable, and the ideal the fact. I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in the clouds, as light as any of them.... I was living in a time of high political tumult, and I certainly cared very much for the question of slavery which was then filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the shame and wrong of our fugitive slave law; I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where the great struggle between the two great principles in our nationality was beginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend that any of these things were more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound interest in literature."[99]