William Dean Howells

In 'London Films' Mr. Howells certainly maintains his deserved reputation. His delightful essays are characterized by a genial sympathy quite unlike any other author's of the present time. It is this sympathy with his subject that gives the charm to the book. There is a broad indefiniteness or lack of mathematical accuracy that gives a pleasing literary tone to the book. He writes of the royal family, its movements and customs, although confessing the royal family has rarely come...

A companion volume to 'London Films', in which Mr. Howells writes of Bath, Oxford, Canterbury and other delightful English towns, with glimpses of the country in between. The author catches the true spirit and dominant tone of each locality, and he regales the reader with various little adventures along the road. Mr. Howells is especially alert for details that link English history with our own, and have a special interest for the American traveler.

With that genially serious attention to minute details, that humorous circumstantiality in treating the commonplace, which we have all come to know so well and to like (or dislike) so heartily in Mr. Howells, he has filled a substantial volume with his easily-flowing narrative of a Mediterranean vacation journey, naming his book 'Roman Holidays and Others.' The first landing of his party was made at Madeira, whence they proceeded to Gibraltar, and then to Genoa, Naples, Rome, Leghorn,...

'Miss Bellard's Inspiration' has a charm altogether out of proportion to its pretensions. It is no more than a novelette in dimensions, and its story is of the simplest. but displays in the telling a very delicate art. There are six people concerned – Miss Ballard and her fiancé, the aunt and uncle with whom they spend a few days in the country, and a married couple who are their guests by chance. This couple proves to be singularly mismated, and the spectacle afforded by their...

One of the greatest rewards which literary fame has to give must be the power which it lends an author of being on intimate terms with his public. An author has won his spurs, his public know and love him, and he can then, if he will, talk to them in print as he might chat with friends. Trivial subjects become important because he chooses to write about them. He is at ease with his readers, so much so that he can drop all formality and discuss questions of the day, or tell them what he saw in a...

A group of people from Boston and inland towns of Iowa and New York spent the three months between December and March, 1901 – 1902, in New York City for different reasons. Their «letters home» to various relations and friends tell an ingenious story. The fascination of the great city tells upon them all, and excellent descriptions of the turn-of-the-century New York appear in all the letters.

Mr. Howells is at his best in this novel. There is in it the same perfection of finish, the same absolute sureness of technique, the same realism (to use an overworked word, but here used in its true sense, not meaning either nastiness or stupidity) which one is always sure to find in his work. But there is something more in this book than in some of his others – more strength, more interest, and a bigger, and successful, attempt to show the more emotional and more vital side of life. The plot...

The numerous class of novel readers who for a lifetime have wandered through the fields of fiction, not premeditatedly seeking mental or moral improvement, but with a mind chiefly on «pleasure bent,» have a treat in store in 'Heroines of Fiction.' Mr. Howells does not write of his own heroines of fiction – it is the creations of the English and American novelists of times long ago who have filled an imaginative world with a galaxy of feminine loveliness and charm that he considers. The...

The heroine of the 'Ragged Lady' is a New England type of young girl – strong, pure, uneducated, loyal, proud; a girl whose head always governs her heart, and whose moral sense permits no confusion in distinguishing right from wrong. She sees and acts, and by her quickness of apprehension causes confusion in the minds of those who differ with her. Into the world, under the care, or rather at the whim, of a vulgar, rich, selfish old woman, this little New England girl, who had never...

Mr. Howells' father, who was a Welshman, moved to a property on the Little Miami River in southern Ohio to take charge of a sawmill and gristmill and superintend their transformation into paper-mills. Mr. Howells describes a year of this life in a half-settled country, and tells how perfectly happy he was in his home-life and how intensely he suffered from homesickness when obliged to leave his mother to help earn money for a large family. Somehow or other, when Mr. Howells writes ff his...

Mr. Howells has always had a pretty taste in titles, and 'The Coast of Bohemia', by its name alone, brings pleasurable anticipations. Nor are they doomed to disappointment in this instance, for the story is pleasing in all its aspects. The Bohemia upon whose coasts it bids us linger is the somewhat sophisticated and denationalized Bohemia of the New York art schools and studios ; the flavor of its life is very different from that of the enchanted region which Murger opened for us, but...

Mr. Howells's 'A Traveler from Altruria' recounts only his social apostle's acts and experiences at a summer hotel in a mountain village of New England, and includes none of the epistles upon the World's Fair and the life of New York that his chronicler has recently sent to him through a magazine. The author calls the book a romance, but its form is a thinly disguised and somewhat acrid tract for the times, marked in the narrative passages by the colloquialisms that now...

There is rare fun and freshness in Mr. W. D. Howells's. 'Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories', a little volume charming for New Year or Thanksgiving. It is redolent, indeed, of all these, especially of November sweets, when turkey and cranberry sauce crown the board and pumpkin-pies smile saucily from its end. Mr. Howells shows in these tales an unexpected tenderness lurking in a corner of his capacious heart –a tenderness for children under a veil of humor that is particularly...

'Stops of Various Quills' is a remarkable book, concerning which there will probably be considerable difference of opinion among readers of current verse, though there ought to be none, and will be none among those who are capable of looking beyond and below mere poetic technique into the thing which is poetry itself – the thought which is in the poet's mind, the feeling which is in his heart, and which, whether he has captured it in his verse, or whether it has evaded him, is...

In 'A Hazard of New Fortunes' Mr. Howells took for his hero the editor of a New York magazine. In 'The World of Chance' the leading character is a young journalist of Midland, a town indefinitely located a day's journey west of New York City. He goes to the metropolis with the manuscript of his first novel, «A Modern Romeo,» in his pocket. The adventures of this manuscript, making its way from publisher to publisher, and finally returning to the first one, who had wished...

Mr. Howells' latest novel deserves and will receive wide reading. It deals with a problem which had found its way into American social life of his time: «How will a cultivated and beautiful woman feel if she discovers that she has a tinge of negro blood in her veins? How will other people, particularly her lover, feel and act?» Mr. Howells works out the problem with skill, on what seem to us sound lines of reasoning. 'An Imperative Duty' is so mature a work, and so good an example...

The question of the identity of 'A Boy's Town', has excited almost as much interest, in a certain section of our country, as the long-discussed question of the birthplace of Homer. That Mr. Howells is his own Boy there can be no doubt. But Mr. Howells, according to the biographies, was born at Martin's Ferry in 1837. The family moved to Hamilton when he was three years of age, to Dayton when he was nine, and to Columbus—probably the scene of the opening chapters of «The...

This volume includes the following stories by William Dean Howells: «A Day's Pleasure», «Buying a Horse», «Flitting», «The Mouse» and «A Year in a Venetian Palace.»

To meet Mr. Howells again on his Italian rambles is like rejoining an old friend in the midst of scenes associated with the beginning of our friendship. This rich volume is a grateful recollection of the book which first gave him a place in our standard literature. Much of the old charm of 'Venetian Life' is certainly here. The daring disregard of conventionality, the happy discovery of aspects of life un noticed by previous travelers, the artistic and novel use of illustrative...

In this volume Mr. Howells has collected three short pieces which show his power under various aspects. The pleasantest and in a literary sense the best of the three is the charming paper on 'Lexington,' originally contributed to Longman's Magazine. It is distinguished by that happy faculty of description, that sure artistic eye, and that genial spirit which constitute so much of the fascination of his larger works; flashes of characteristic humor surprise us in its delicate...

"A Woman's Reason" is certainly one of the most ambitious novels Mr. Howells has written, not merely because it is so long, but because the author has reached out for effects which he neglected in his earlier books. It is not a radical departure from his established methods, but it indicates a larger and broader conception of the scope, the opportunities, and the resources of his art. The story of Helen Harkness's struggles has an enduring claim upon every reader's sympathy,...

This work of Mr. Howells is similar in lightness of material and delicacy of workman ship to «A Fearful Responsibility» and other minor productions of his deft hand which hold a unique and ill-defined position between the novel and the short story. It is brief; it is free from the mysteries of a plot; it is perfectly simple in plan; and the characters are not elaborated, but rather sketched with a few strong touches, so quick and free that we hardly appreciate the excellence of the art until we...

"Out of the Question" is an amusing trifle, with just a thread of a plot, about the love of a young society girl for a brave young fellow without any social position other than his brains has gained him; the idea of marriage with him is scouted by herself and friends at first as quite «out of the question.» The charm of the story is in the piquant way in which it is handled, and in its bright, clever dialogue.