Monatsarchive: März 2021

My Year In A Log Cabin – William Dean Howells

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 boyhood, there is always a tinge of sadness about him. With his love for the comrades of his youth there breathe, as it were, notes … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

The World Of Chance – William Dean Howells

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 to publish it despite the adverse opinions expressed by all his “readers,” are of extreme interest. The book is finally issued by Mr. Brandreth, of the Chapley … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

A Little Swiss Sojourn – William Dean Howells

‘A Little Swiss Sojourn’ was passed in the village of Villeneuve in the canton of Vaud, where a comfortable pension, vineyards galore, a gothic chapel, the placid lake, the snow-covered Alps, an occasional château (to let, furnished, for $500 a year) lent charm, dignity and ample opportunity for reminiscence to the visit of three months of which this narrative records the impressions. It is a pretty picture of an alien civilization, having certain quaint analogies with our own hard-favored rural New England, which Mr. Howells sets forth with characteristic appreciation.

A Little Swiss Sojourn.

Format: eBook.

A Little Swiss Sojourn.

ISBN: 9783849657550

Excerpt from the text:

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Out of eighty … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

The Quality Of Mercy – William Dean Howells

Mr. Howells has this time chosen a subject for illustration which affords plenty of ground for serious thinking. He has written a story of defalcation; the too familiar story of the treasurer of a rich corporation who, himself rich, is greedy for more money; who first uses the funds at his disposal for personal ends; pays them back; uses them again and cannot pay them back; falsifies the books and so gains time to steal more; is at last found out, and b ing given three days to make restitution, finds himself called upon to choose between suicide, surrender, or flight to Canada. It cannot be said that there is anything new … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

Criticism And Fiction – William Dean Howells

In ‘Criticism and Fiction’ Mr. Howells gives his ideas of the proper functions of critics, and the lines along which he may be supposed to have written his novels . He considers criticism an entirely contemplative branch of literature; finding in it, seemingly, no creative potentialities . The critic, he thinks, should first consider what the author has tried to do, then examine how he has done it . As to whether or not the thing was worth doing that concerns the author, not the critic. The critic need not say whether the book is good or bad; for, in the first place, it is none of his business; in the second, he … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

An Imperative Duty – William Dean Howells

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 of the author’s method, that it invites the closest scrutiny. It is written with his usual acuteness and cleverness, but with even more than … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

A Boy’s Town – William Dean Howells

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 Shadow of a Dream”-when he was fourteen. Each of these Western cities now claims the honor of being immortalized by the Boy, although the Dayton Herald declared, … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

The Shadow Of A Dream – William Dean Howells

‘The Shadow of a Dream’ makes readers familiar with this rather peculiar development of a peculiar subject, and the tragic ending which is so much more pronounced than any other of the real facts of Howells’ novels on which one can decisively lay a finger, as to give the reader an actual shock of horror. This bit of “the stuff that dreams are made of” but gives us an instance of the strange power of dream phantasies over our waking life – a power that more than one of us has felt, and sets us wondering likewise if there is, after all, any definite boundary between sanity and insanity, and whether … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

A Hazard Of New Fortunes – William Dean Howells

No one can complain that in this story Mr. Howells has taken his type from the commonplace. It is a study of life in New York, and the author has brought together such a gallery of odd and strongly differentiated characters as could perhaps be found in no other city on the continent, while the conditions and phases of social life represented are not less distinctive and peculiar. The Marches, it is true, are from Boston, but they serve the purpose of external points of observation, whence to note and sufficiently to emphasize those features of our city life which of necessity strike strangers and outsiders most forcibly and with the … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...