William Dean: 355 books

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,”...

If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to literature than...

Published in 1910, this book is a testament to the long friendship between Howells and Twain.  "Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists," Howells writes;  "they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens...

Monday afternoon the storm which had been beating up against the southeasterly wind nearly all day thickened, fold upon fold, in the northwest. The gale increased, and blackened the harbor and whitened the open sea beyond, where sail after sail appeared round the reef of Whaleback Light, and ran in a wild scamper for the safe anchorages within.

One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear to a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a literature of our own, we have no literary centre. We have so much literature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have a literary centre. We say...

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Howells was appointed United States consul in Venice, Italy. In Venetian Life, an utterly engaging travelogue, Howells revises a series of travel letters he had written about his experiences in Venice for the Boston Advertiser. Honest in its love for (yet discomfort in) Venice, it would be followed by Italian Journeys.

Howells spent several years in Italy as a diplomat. He wrote a number of timeless books based on his travels there, including Italian Journeys and Venetian Life. A captivating portrait of one of Italy’s fabled regions, Tuscan Cities is indispensable reading for travelers and armchair dreamers alike.

CERTAIN summers ago our cruisers, the St. Louis and the Harvard, arrived at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with sixteen or seventeen hundred Spanish prisoners from Santiago de Cuba. They were partly soldiers of the land forces picked up by our troops in the fights before the city, but by far the greater...

When we said that we were going to Scheveningen, in the middle of September, the portier of the hotel at The Hague was sure we should be very cold, perhaps because we had suffered so much in his house already; and he was right, for the wind blew with a Dutch tenacity of purpose for a whole week, so that...

Being the wholly literary spirit I was when I went to make my home in Cambridge, I do not see how I could well have been more content if I had found myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity before me. At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically immortal, and at that age, time had for me...

Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan importance. I had met him...