Back Seven Novels 1875–1888 (two volumes)

William Dean Howells: Seven Novels 1875–1888 (two volumes)

“Why read third- or fourth-rate fiction just to be entertained, when you can be entertained and enlightened by a wise master of fiction who knew what the world was about as well as pretty nearly any writer of his time in America?”—The Tampa Tribune-Times

Overview

Overview

Interviews Cultural panic and overwhelming change: Richard White looks back on America’s first Gilded Age
February 14, 2018

News Mark Twain and William Dean Howells: the friendship that transformed American literature
October 24, 2017

William Dean Howells was a champion of French and Russian realistic writers and a brilliant advocate of the most controversial American writers of his own time. Howells’s own novels elaborate what he called a “merciful distrust of our own judgements.” This distrust, in part a recognition of the degree to which social institutions intrude upon and shape our private lives, informs both the subjects of his novels and the way they are written.

In A Foregone Conclusion (1875), a young American painter roams through Europe for years before at last deciding to marry the woman who, he erroneously thinks, has been in love with an Italian priest turned agnostic. A Modern Instance (1882) offers an unflinching portrait of an unhappy marriage and ends with a hero barred by his perhaps overscrupulous conscience from marrying the divorced heroine. One of the most engaging of all his novels, Indian Summer (1885), is touched with the Jamesian glamour of romantic confusion among two American couples in Italy. And The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howells’s best-known work, gives a brilliantly skeptical portrait of American business life and its perils, celebrating not the rise but the loss of fortune that makes possible the hero’s recovery of his earlier integrity and happiness.

The second volume in this set contains three of Howells’s most revered novels. In The Minister’s Charge (1886), Lemuel Barker leaves his impoverished farm and comes to Boston hoping to become a published poet. Proud, innocent, and implacably honest, he is quickly plunged into the humiliating depths of urban homelessness. His plight weighs on the conscience of David Sewell, a minister who could not bear to tell Barker how bad his poetry was. April Hopes (1887) presents Alice Pasmer, the only daughter of parents whose dwindling investments have forced their return from Europe to New England. When Alice meets Dan Mavering, the easygoing son of a wealthy wallpaper manufacturer, her mother begins a careful campaign to bring about their marriage. The heroine of Annie Kilburn (1888) returns to her Massachusetts home after eleven years abroad and finds a once-quiet village rapidly turning into a sprawling factory town with paved streets, electric lights, and a department store. Unmarried at thirty-one, she renews ties with old friends and begins a life devoted to good deeds.

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2098 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

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William Dean Howells: Seven Novels 1875–1888 (two volumes)

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