Archiv der Kategorie: Howells, William Dean

Ragged Lady – William Dean Howells

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 seen a city, goes. Her new life begins, but is never wholly separated from the days of semi-service in a summer hotel. The people of that summer … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

The Story Of A Play – William Dean Howells

‘The Story of a Play’ is a pleasing addition to the list of the charming trivialities to which Mr. Howells has chiefly devoted himself in the late years of the 19th century. It now seems a confirmed habit with him to select for treatment some closely circumscribed phase of experience, to make it the subject of the most searching and minute observation, and to develop its utmost possibilities. This intensive method of literary cultivation is the method best calculated to yield artistic results ; and, if this work of Mr. Howells does sometimes suggest the carving of cherry-stones, the carving is very neatly done. Few subjects are more hackneyed than that … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

An Open-Eyed Conspiracy – William Dean Howells

‘An Open-Eyed Conspiracy’ is an extremely delightful book, and delightful in a way in which many American writers have long striven, and are still striving to attract, or distract, the attention of their readers, but in which Howells alone can be said to have attained distinction. He represents an element in the character of his countrymen, literary and otherwise, which may be roughly described as a sleepless sense of humor, which expends itself in some minds in large exaggerations of thought and speech, in others in the invention of tumultuous incidents and the horseplay of practical jokes, and in others in the exploitation of dialects, Eastern, Western, Southern, which never obtained anywhere, the … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

The Landlord At Lion’s Head – William Dean Howells

In ‘The Landlord at Lion’s Head’ Mr. Howells has returned to the New England which he knows so well. Indeed, his absolute intimacy with the life there, his vivid power of reproducing it, contradicts Mr. Henry James’ opinion that the literary artist should write only of the impressions received in childhood and early youth. When Mr. Howells became familiar with New England he was a man of nearly thirty. But he had sprung from New England stock, and be fitted into the life of Boston as if he had always belonged to it. Perhaps his early years in Ohio enabled him to see New England with a clearer vision than he … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

Stories Of Ohio – William Dean Howells

Mr. Howells has in the present volume given his writings the form of a series of historical stories, in which his native State is described and pictured from as remote a period as the geologic ice age. The slow-moving glaciers in the distant past covered most of the present State of Ohio. They rounded off the corners of her hills, smoothed the contour of her valleys, left glacial scratches on her rocks, and transported boulders from remote points where they had an origin and left them on the various glacial moraines. After the ice age came a strange and mysterious people who left traces of their one-time existence in the shape of curious … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

Stops Of Various Quills – William Dean Howells

‘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 individual, vital, inevitable. Mr. Howells has given us here a remarkable book, as we have said, and one which we would select as an infallible touchstone … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

My Literary Passions – William Dean Howells

The sort of autobiography of which ‘My Literary Passions’ is an example is always interesting. Mr. Howells is by no means the first to write upon the theme of “Books Which Have Influenced Me”, but we do not just now think of anyone before him who has made it the subject of a whole volume. Mr. Howells has had many “literary passions”- fifty, or thereabouts, to reckon only from the chapter headings-and in not a few cases it is obvious that he has loved not wisely, but too well. What we particularly like about the book, aside from the unfailing charm of its manner, is the frankly subjective character of the record. Mr. … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

A Traveler From Altruria – William Dean Howells

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 please Mr. Howells. Designedly unindividual, the village, the hotel and some of their characters are broadly typical of their kind. Other characters are only voices. From a remarkably observant … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

The Coast Of Bohemia – William Dean Howells

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 its ways are engaging if decorous, and its denizens are very much alive while not too much in earnest. We do not discover among them any of … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...

Christmas Every Day (And Other Stories) – William Dean Howells

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 attractive and also a grotesque yet merry fancy which cannot fail to delight them. What a delightful world is the child’s world and how few there be that enter … Read more.../Mehr lesen ...