William Dean Howells
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The Rise of Silas Lapham, by William Dean Howells, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies...
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One of the most influential authors of the late nineteenth century, and a former editor of the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine, William Dean Howells wrote more than fifty novels, as well as plays, memoirs, and poetry collections. Opposed to the sentimentalism, contrived heroism, and theatrical endings in fiction, he developed a literary style based on unvarnished realism. This unique genre is brilliantly depicted in A Modern Instance, a novel...
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Indian Summer is often considered William Dean Howells's best novel after The Rise of Silas Lapham. Mark Twain commended the novel by declaring to Howells, "You are really my only author," and Howells himself considered this tale about a middle-aged man's misdirected love for a widow's young ward as among his best character studies.
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This novel from popular nineteenth-century American author William Dean Howells features a visitor from a mysterious distant island known as Altruria. The contrast between the utopian island community and conditions in 1890s America provides remarkable insight into the social and cultural issues facing the country then -- and now. A must-read for fans of utopian fantasy and science fiction. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary...
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New York City. The dawn of a new century. Two men intent on changing the world with two very different visions.
When a self-made millionaire and a new-age social revolutionary come head-to-head, there's no telling who will come out on top. One wants the world. The other wants to give it to those less fortunate. And when a goodwill man steps in to act as mediator, he soon finds himself at a crisis of conscience. How should man choose who wins and loses?...
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Basil and Isabel March first appeared in Howells's Their Wedding Journey, which followed the newly married couple as they traveled to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon. Here, Howells returns to the March marriage as they revisit Hamburg, Carlsbad, Weimar, Leipzig, and Berlin-the cities of their youthful courtship.
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Imagine meeting a literary legend. In this whimsical fantasy, William Dean Howells does just that. Here, Howells pretends to meet Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Festival. They are joined by Sir Francis Bacon, leading to jokes about the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy. To Howell's delight, Shakespeare provides many glimpses into the jovial times in which he lived.
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This 1910 collection of satiric essays on editors, the publishing industry, music, and culture includes "Sclerosis of the Tastes," "Intimations of Italian Opera," "The Superiority of Our Inferiors," "Unimportance of Women in Republics," "Cheapness of the Costliest City on Earth," "The Magazine Muse," "Qualities Without Defects," and "A Normal Hero and Heroine Out of Work."
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Published in 1893, The Coast of Bohemia features a female art student as its protagonist. The scenery and feel of the book is said to have been inspired by Howells's early experiences at Pfaff's, a beer cellar in New York that drew artists, playwrights, and writers.
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William Dean Howells frequently drew on his Midwestern childhood for his fiction. Based on an incident in Ohio that had always fascinated him, The Leatherwood God tells the intriguing tale of how a charlatan named Joseph Dylks, claiming to be a messenger of God (or even God himself), exploited the pious townspeople, split their devout community in two, and then disappeared.
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Some of William Dean Howells's best fiction examines the contrast between different manners or levels of sophistication, a subject made familiar to him in part by his sojourn as an American in Italy. This collection of stories shows American and Italian manners in conflict, drawing on Howells's own experiences as a diplomat in Venice.
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This 1907 volume contains seven short stories characterized by the author as "romances": "A Sleep and a Forgetting," "The Eidolons of Brooks Alford," "A Memory that Worked Overtime," "A Case of Metaphantasmia," "Editha," "Baybridge's Offer," and "The Chick of the Easter Egg."
14) April Hopes
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William Dean Howells, the highly respected author of novels of social realism, occasionally turned his storytelling skills to romantic comedies. In 1888 he published April Hopes, a comedy of manners that follows the romantic complications between a young woman and her fiancé.
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This 1907 utopian romance is the final volume in the trilogy that includes A Traveler from Alturia (1894) and Letters of an Alturian Traveler (1904). The novel takes the form of letters from the protagonist, Aristides Homos, to his friend Cyril. In New York City, Homos falls in love with Evelith Strange, a socialite whose lifestyle conflicts with her Christian values-values that Homos could help her regain back in utopian Alturia, if she accepts his...
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At the New York City gentlemen's club known as the Turkish Room, members gathered to tell stories of psychic phenomena and the supernatural. This 1903 departure for the "Dean of American Realism" includes three novellas: "His Apparition," "The Angel of the Lord," and "Though One Rose from the Dead."
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This 1886 novel introduces Howells's concept-derived from Tolstoy-of moral complicity, which would play a large part in his fiction from this point on. A poor farmer, Lemuel Barker, comes to Boston with dreams of becoming a poet. Instead, his naïveté leaves him an easy mark, and he is soon destitute. A minister, Sewell, is forced to consider his own complicity in Barker's fate . . . and by extension that of all his less-fortunate fellows.
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A prolific novelist, playwright, and literary critic, Howells was an ardent proponent of realism in fiction. He also wrote juvenile fiction, including this book, one of his more popular novels. It tells the story of Pony Baker, and his cousin Frank and buddy Jim, and all their attempts to run away, and why they always give up.
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Praised for the masterfully drawn protagonist, Jeff Durgan, The Landlord at Lion's Head-considered one of Howells's best novels for its expert characterization-follows Durgin from his impoverished childhood on a New England farm, to his unsuccessful career at Harvard, and finally to success at his fashionable hotel on the old farm's site.
20) The Kentons
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"You have done nothing more true and complete," wrote Henry James about William Dean Howells's novel The Kentons. Here, Howells follows a Midwestern family as they travel first to New York and then to Holland-in order to take the daughter, Ellen, away from an abusive relationship. Along the way they explore the contrasts between their Ohio manners and those of the regions they visit, a familiar theme in Howells's work.