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 divorce--that...

William Dean Howells' richly humorous characterization of a self-made millionaire in Boston society provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age. After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston, where they awkwardly attempt to break into Brahmin society. Silas, greedy for wealth as well as prestige, brings his company to the brink of bankruptcy, and the family is forced to return to Vermont, financially ruined but morally renewed. As Kermit Vanderbilt points out in his introduction, the novel focuses...

Set against a vividly depicted background of fin de siecle 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...

These two nouvelles mark Howells' plunge into psychological realism. Their themes-a triangle of tragic agonies with psychological insights intriguingly proto-Freudian, and a drama of miscegenation-are anything but the "smiling," lightweight topics to which Howells has been supposed to have been confined. The maturity both of their art and of their moral insight lends them an impact much deeper and more permanent than that of the shriller, more merely commercial shocking fiction of our day. Edwin H. Cady's introduction places the books in the context of the development of Howells' life, work,...

Main-Travelled Roads contains eleven stories in this expanded and revised 1922 edition of an undisputed American classic. "Under the Lion's Paw" shows an honest, hard-working farmer victimized by a greedy landlord. Equally powerful is the semi-autobiographical "Up the Coolly," concerning a successful son who returns from the East to find his mother and brother trapped on a poor farm, defeated in spite of their best efforts. "Mrs. Ripley's Trip" is a tender story of an elderly couple settled in their frugal country ways, with the wife determined to realize her dream of revisiting...

William Dean Howells and Mark Twain were intimate friends for more than forty years. Shortly after Mark Twain died in 1910, Howells recorded this classic reminiscence of the man who, he said, "pervaded" the era "almost more than any other man of letters, if not quite more...".This new annotated edition of the book includes the biographical sketch, Howells' twelve critical essays on Mark Twain, and additional information about the social and literary issues, the people, places, and events to which Howells alludes.

During the 1860s, W.D. Howells was the American consul in Venice. This text is his humorous portrait of the city. He swam in the Grand Canal, dined with the rich and mingled with the humble. Howells tells his story with wit and curiosity.

The short stories of Ohio-born William Dean Howells (1837-1920), the leading figure in American realism, have been largely unknown to the reading public, at least partly because of their general unavailability and because of the difficulties of identifying, among Howells's voluminous short writings, those that are clearly short stories.
"Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells" includes the full texts of thirteen of Howells's short stories, each preceded by a thorough critical analysis, and an annotated short story list, identifying and discussing all of Howells's short stories....

The short stories of William Dean Howells have been largely unknown to the reading public, at least partly because of their general unavailability and because of the difficulties of identifying, among Howells's voluminous short writings, those that are clearly short stories. Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells includes both the full texts of thirteen of Howells's stories, each preceded by a thorough critical analysis, and an annotated short story list identifying and discussing all of Howells's short stories. The book pays particular attention to the period after 1890, when...