Howe, Edgar Watson, 1853–1937, American editor and author, b. Treaty, near Wabash, Ind. From 1877 to 1911 he was editor and proprietor of the Atchison, Kans., Daily Globe, and in 1911 he established E. W. Howe's Monthly. Published until 1937, this periodical was noted for Howe's pithy editorials. His first and generally considered best book is The Story of a Country Town (1883), among the first realistic novels of small-town life in the Midwest and a precursor of the naturalistic novel in American fiction. Always a champion of the common people, Howe was nicknamed the “Sage of Potato Hill.”
See his autobiography, Plain People (1929).
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