Literary Friends and Acquaintance; a Personal Retrospect of American Authorship
(Literary Friends and Acquaintance; a Personal Retrospect ...)
Literary Friends and Acquaintance; a Personal Retrospect of American Authorship is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by William Dean Howells is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of William Dean Howells then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.
Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells
(In this unique and long-awaited volume, Michael Anesko do...)
In this unique and long-awaited volume, Michael Anesko documents the literary cross-fertilization between Henry James and William Dean Howells, collecting 151 letters, nearly all the extant correspondence between the two men, as well as the most significant critical commentary James wrote on Howells and Howells wrote on James.
Scholars have long recognized the peculiar importance of the relationship between these two exponents of realistic fiction--their mutual respect and occasional animosity. But the record of their affinities and substantial differences has never before been so amply and compellingly established. Containing dozens of previously unpublished letters by James, and featuring a detailed biographical chronology as well as extensive interpretive commentaries that meticulously chart the development of this remarkable literary friendship, Letters, Fictions, Lives, edited to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, will prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of James and Howells, and will hold great interest for dedicated readers of their fiction and for those studying epistolary issues and literary influence between contemporaries.
(I confess that with all my curiosity to meet an Altrurian...)
I confess that with all my curiosity to meet an Altrurian, I was in no hospitable mood toward the traveler when he finally presented himself, pursuant to the letter of advice sent me by the friend who introduced him. It would be easy enough to take care of him in the hotel; I had merely to engage a room for him, and have the clerk tell him his money was not good if he tried to pay for anything. But I had swung fairly into my story; its people were about me all the time; I dwelt amid its events and places, and I did not see how I could welcome my guest among them, or abandon them for him. Still, when he actually arrived, and I took his hand as he stepped from the train, I found it less difficult to say that I was glad to see him than I expected. In fact, I was glad, for I could not look upon his face without feeling a glow of kindness for him.
(Set against a vividly depicted background of fin de siécl...)
Set against a vividly depicted background of fin de siécle New York, this novel centers on the conflict between a self-made millionaire and a fervent social revolutionary-a conflict in which a man of goodwill futilely attempts to act as a mediator, only to be forced himself into a crisis of conscience. Here we see William Dean Howells's grasp of the realities of the American experience in an age of emerging social struggle. His absolute determination to fairly represent every point of view is evident throughout this multifaceted work. Both a memorable portrait of an era and a profoundly moving study of human relationships, A Hazard of New Fortunes fully justifies Alfred Kazin's ranking of Howells as "the first great domestic novelist of American life."
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
(The publication in 1882 of this classic book by The Dean...)
The publication in 1882 of this classic book by The Dean of American Letters marked his transition from magazine editor and author of some mildly received comedies of manners, to leading American novelist and champion of realism in American literature. The story of Bartley Hubbard, a philandering, dishonest Boston journalist, and Marcia Gaylord, the wife who divorces him, is the first serious treatment of divorce in American literature. Although Howells had considered writing the novel for years, the actual composition of it brought forth another theme besides that of divorcethat of new journalism. Yet these two innovative and powerful themes are no more than vehicles for Howellss real achievementthe perceptive delineation of contemporary American character, conditions in American culture, and the acute dislocations in ethical sensibility that fray the social fabric.
Bartley was still free as air; but if he could once make up his mind to settle down in a hole like Equity he could have her by turning his hand.
William Dean Howells - Premium Collection: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated): The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Traveler from Altruria, Through the Eye of ... of New Fortunes, Ragged Lady & many more
(This carefully crafted ebook: "William Dean Howells - Pre...)
This carefully crafted ebook: "William Dean Howells - Premium Collection: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents.
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day", and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria. Howells is known to be the father of American realism, and a denouncer of the sentimental novel. He was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His stories of Boston upper crust life set in the 1850s are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
William Dean Howells by Charles Dudley Warner
Novels
A Forgone Conclusion
A Chance Acquaintance
A Modern Instance
A Pair of Patient Lovers
A Traveler from Altruria
An Open-Eyed Conspiracy
Annie Kilburn
April Hopes
Dr. Breen's Practice
Fennel and Rue
Indian Summer
Questionable Shapes
Ragged Lady
The Coast of Bohemia
The Kentons
The Lady of Aroostook
The Landlord at Lion's Head
The Leatherwood God
The Minister's Charge
The Quality of Mercy
The Rise of Silas Lapham
The Story of a Play
Through the Eye of the Needle
The Flight of Pony Baker
The March Family Trilogy:
Their Wedding Journey
A Hazard of New Fortunes
Their Silver Wedding Journey
Reminiscences and Autobiography
A Boy's Town
Years of My Youth
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
(One of the most charming and memorable romantic comedies ...)
One of the most charming and memorable romantic comedies in American literature, William Dean Howells's Indian Summer tells of a season in the life of Theodore Colville. Colville, just turned forty, has spent years as a successful midwestern newspaper publisher. Now he sells his business and heads for Italy, where as a young man he had dreamed of a career as an architect and fallen hopelessly in love. In Florence, Colville runs into Lina Bowen, sometime best friend of the woman who jilted him and the vivacious survivor of an unhappy marriage. He also meets her young visitor, twenty-year-old Imogene Grahamlovely, earnest to a fault, and brimming with the excitement of her first encounter with the great world.
The drama that plays out among these three gifted and well-meaning people against the backdrop of Florence, the brilliance of their repartee, and the accumulating burden of their mutual misunderstandings make for a comedy of errors that is as winning as it is wise.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition.
(
Possibly the most influential figure in the history of ...)
Possibly the most influential figure in the history of American letters, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was, among other things, a leading novelist in the realist tradition, a formative influence on many of America's finest writers, and an outspoken opponent of social injustice. This biography, the first comprehensive work on Howells in fifty years, enters the consciousness of the man and his times, revealing a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism. Written with verve and originality in a highly absorbing style, it brings alive for a new generation a literary and cultural pioneer who played a key role in creating the American artistic ethos.
William Dean Howells traces the writer's life from his boyhood in Ohio before the Civil War, to his consularship in Italy under President Lincoln, to his rise as editor of Atlantic Monthly. It looks at his writing, which included novels, poems, plays, children's books, and criticism. Howells had many powerful friendships among the literati of his day; and here we find an especially rich examination of the relationship between Howells and Mark Twain. Howells was, as Twain called him, "the boss" of literary criticshis support almost single-handedly made the careers of many writers, including African Americans like Paul Dunbar and women like Sarah Orne Jewett. Showcasing many noteworthy personalitiesHenry James, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and many othersWilliam Dean Howells portrays a man who stood at the center of American literature through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
(
One of the most fascinating experiments in American lit...)
One of the most fascinating experiments in American literature resulted in The Whole Family. This unusual composite novel numbers among its twelve authors such luminaries as Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
The idea for this collaborative venture originated with Howells in 1906. Under the guidance of Elizabeth Jordan, the energetic editor of Harpers Bazar (as it was then known), each of the authors was invited to write a successive chapter in a story Howells envisioned as a definitive depiction of American family life. But the original plan underwent a dramatic reversal with a controversial chapter by Freeman. From that point, The Whole Family became a more involved story of family misunderstandings and rivalries that actually mirrored the rivalries of the contributors themselves.
Alfred Bendixens lively introduction offers the first accurate and complete account of the creation of this remarkable noveluncovering new facts and revealing the turmoil out of which it was shaped. June Howards foreword provides an additional contextual and critical perspective.
The Whole Family will be enjoyed by admirers of American literature at the start of the twenty-first century as much as it was by those at the beginning of the twentieth. In addition to delightful plot twists and characters, it offers a remarkable view into the ways in which family life hasand has notchanged over the course of a century.
Full list of authors. Mary R. Shipman Andrews, John Kendrick Bangs, Alice Brown, Mary Stewart Cutting, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Jordan, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Henry van Dyke, Mary Heaton Vorse, Edith Wyatt
William Dean Howells, American writer and editor, was an influential critic and an important novelist of the late 19th century.
Background
William Dean Howells was born on March 1, 1837, in Martinsville, Ohio (now known as Martins Ferry, Ohio), to William Cooper Howells and Mary Dean Howells.
His father, William Cooper Howells, a deeply religious Swedenborgian of Quaker origin, was a self-educated printer and Whig journalist, who had difficulty supporting his large family.
They moved in 1840 to Hamilton, Ohio, and here the boy's early life was spent successively as type-setter, reporter and editor in the offices of various newspapers.
By 1851 William was setting type for the Ohio State Journal in Columbus, the state capital, where his father was clerk of the house of the Ohio legislature.
Education
He moved from place to place in Ohio all during William's childhood, which gave the boy the opportunity to learn the printer's trade and to experience a kind of poverty, though it ended his formal education at the age of ten.
William spent scarcely a year in the classroom, but his father's offices afforded a thorough and meaningful education.
During these years young Howells taught himself German, French, Spanish, and some Latin; he became conversant with great poets, especially Shakespeare, and grew to love such prose masterpieces as Don Quixote.
Career
In 1840 William Cooper Howells bought the Hamilton Intelligencer; here the future novelist soon learned to set type side by side with his brother.
In 1849 their father sold his paper and bought shares in the Dayton Transcript.
In 1860, as assistant editor of the leading Republican newspaper in Ohio, he wrote-in connexion with the Presidential contest-the campaign life of Lincoln; and in the same year he was appointed consul at Venice, where he remained till 1865.
He had applied for a diplomatic appointment and was finally given Venice.
The months before his departure were important; traveling east, he met some of America's most important writers: James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in Massachusetts; Walt Whitman in New York.
Howells returned to America with his wife and infant daughter in 1865.
He accepted an editorial post on the Nation in New York, but his ambition was to live in Boston and work on the Atlantic Monthly.
He published the work of talented local-color writers from every part of the country: Sarah Orne Jewett, Edward Eggleston, Bret Harte, and many more.
He featured works of fellow pioneers of the new realism and important writings of two of his closest friends, Henry James and Mark Twain.
Neither of those giants could abide the other's writings; Howells could admire, help, and learn from both.
Career as Novelist
In 1871 Howells published his first novel, Their Wedding Journey.
Basil is Howells only slightly disguised; Isabel is Mrs. Howells.
These two characters appear again and again in Howells's fiction, usually at some distance from the center of the action.
The novels Howells published in the next 10 years were consistently good but, with the exception of The Undiscovered Country (1880), they are low-key and perhaps a little drab.
Of the novels of the 1880 The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is the most famous.
In this story of a self-made man who tries to buy social position in Boston for his country-bred family, Howells broadened his scope to include characters of a variety of backgrounds and classes.
Since 1885 he has lived in New York.
He also published Poems (1873 and 1886); Stops of Various Quills (1895), a book of verse; books of travel; several amusing farces; and volumes of essays and literary criticism, among others, Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1901), which contains much autobiographical matter, Literature and Life (1902), and English Films (1905).
Howells is by general consent the foremost representative of the realistic school of indigenous American fiction.
In The Minister's Charge (1887) Howells for the first time introduced the concept of "complicity"—the responsibility everyone shares for each individual's deeds.
Main ideas were revealed in Howells's first major novel, A Modern Instance (1882), the tragic story of an impossible marriage that ends in divorce.
This was the first compassionate treatment in American fiction of the problems of a divorced woman.
While he was writing the book in 1886, a bomb exploded during a political meeting in Chicago's Haymarket.
The novel is compassionate, humane, and tragic.
It was during this same period of the late eighties and nineties that Howells became increasingly concerned with social and religious problems, as may be seen in The Minister's Charge (1887) and Annie Kilburn (1889).
Other social problems also engaged Howells's attention.
In the impressive novella An Imperative Duty (1892), he argued eloquently against racism at a moment when his readers were turning rapidly toward white supremacist doctrines.
In 1881 Howells resigned his editorship of the Atlantic and in 1882 took his wife and three children to Europe for a year.
In 1886 Howells had begun the regular review column, "Editor's Study, " in Harper's.
He moved this column from one magazine to another during the 1896, returning to Harper's in 1900.
His reviews consistently recognized the best in contemporary literature.
Howells died in New York City, May 11, 1920, ten years after the death of his wife.
Achievements
William Dean Howells's career spanned a period of radical change in American literature; as novelist, critic, and editor, he contributed greatly to those changes.
Howells was a Christian socialist whose ideals were greatly influenced by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy.
He joined a Christian socialist group in Boston between 1889 and 1891 and attended several churches, including the First Spiritual Temple and the Church of the Carpenter, the latter being affiliated with the Episcopal Church and the Society of Christian Socialists.
Politics
He wrote an official campaign biography supporting the Republican candidates in the 1860 election.
Howells inherited his father's strong abolitionist convictions.
Views
He presented his ideas of a good society, essentially socialistic and libertarian, in the long tale A Traveler from Altruria (1894).
Howells believed the future of American writing was not in poetry but in novels, a form which he saw shifting from "romance" to a serious form.
Quotations:
In Years of My Youth (1916) Howells recalled his earliest training: "I could set type very well, and at ten years and onward till journalism became my university, the printing office was mainly my school".
"I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always 'has the standard of the arts in his power, ' will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not 'simple, natural, and honest, ' because it is not like a real grasshopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field. "
Personality
Howells was honest with everyone, most of all with himself.
Quotes from others about the person
Noting the "documentary" and truthful value of Howells' work, Henry James wrote: "Stroke by stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in the highest degree documentary.
Connections
Returning to Columbus, he met Elinor Mead, a young woman who was visiting her cousin, Rutherford B. Hayes. They were married in 1862 and sustained a happy relationship for 48 years.
His daughter Mildred edited the Life in Letters (1928) of her father.
