For William Dean Howells, American Consul to Venice for four years, Italy was the country that fashioned his prose and fostered his love of travel. One winter, he travelled the length and breadth of Tuscany, from Florence and Fiesole to Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia, and Prato. Immersing himself in all things Tuscan, he describes in compelling detail the daily life -- funerals and weddings, military marches and lovers' trysts -- of a place that was bursting with life and endlessly fascinating to him. He muses on the character of the Italians that he meets, revelling in their sense of drama,...
For William Dean Howells, American Consul to Venice for four years, Italy was the country that fashioned his prose and fostered his love of travel. On...
A Hazard of New Fortunes is a novel by William Dean Howells. Copyrighted in 1889 and first published in the U.S. by Harper & Bros. in 1890, the book was well-received for its portrayal of social injustice. Considered by many to be his best work, the novel is also considered to be the first novel to portray New York City. Some argue that the novel was the first of three Howells wrote with Socialist and Utopian ideals in mind: The Quality of Mercy in 1892, and An Imperative Duty in 1893. In this novel, although Howells briefly discusses the American Civil War, he primarily deals with issues of...
A Hazard of New Fortunes is a novel by William Dean Howells. Copyrighted in 1889 and first published in the U.S. by Harper & Bros. in 1890, the book w...
The Story of a Country Town is both a pioneering triumph of realistic fiction and a landmark in the development of American literature. Written at night after a hard day’s work as editor and publisher of an evening newspaper in Aitchison, Kansas, this novel represents a retreat from the nineteenth-century romantic image of rural life in the American Midwest. Edgar Watson Howe’s portrait of a small town, the fictional Twin Mounds, is a damning indictment of an environment that cripples the mind and corrodes the spirit. His view of village and farm is colored by a...
The Story of a Country Town is both a pioneering triumph of realistic fiction and a landmark in the development of American literature. Wr...
