“‘Dynamite Talk’: William Dean Howells, Racial Socialism, and a Legal Theory of Literary Complicity”

This essay returns to the transcript of the Haymarket trial in order to identify the catalyst behind William Dean Howells’s unlikely conversion from hidebound “Dean of American Letters” into an ardent—if provisional—activist. By linking the defendants’ tracts and speeches with subsequent political acts allegedly committed by their sympathizers, the prosecution had manufactured a juridical reconciliation that successfully collapsed all conceptual space between word and deed, thereby leaving every writer potentially liable for the social lives of their texts.