American editor, novelist, and essayist known for his iconoclasm and pessimism.

Howe went to work at age seven on his father's homestead near Bethany, Mo. An apprentice printer at 12, he worked at the trade in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Utah (1867–72). At 19 he was publisher of the Golden (Colo.) Globe and in 1877 founded the Atchison (Kan.) Daily Globe, made famous by frequent reprinting of his paragraphs throughout the United States. His first and most successful novel, The Story of a Country Town (1883), was the first realistic novel of Midwestern small-town life. He published and edited Howe's Monthly (1911–33) and wrote essays, travel books, and an autobiography, Plain People (1929). His journalistic writing was collected in The Indignations of E.W. Howe (1933) and other books.