A Modern Instance is regarded as one of the most pivotal works in the career of William Dean Howells; it solidified his reputation as a champion of realism in the United States. Part of that realism is the groundbreaking unapologetic portrait of Bartley Hubbard as an agnostic and which could be modeled on Howells' friend Mark Twain.[2] A version of the Bartley Hubbard character appears as a somewhat sleazy journalist interviewing the title character at the beginning of Howells's novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).