William Dean: 355 books

Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer wishes to offer a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that they have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable...

James Russell Lowell has been completely sketched in these pages. Howells brings his multifaceted personality to life. Different phases of his life and most of his works are also critically examined. From his time in Cambridge up till his death major events of his life have been captured.

It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of Ticknor& Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad assistant, with a pretty free...

This 1886 novel introduces Howells's concept—derived from Tolstoy—of moral complicity, which would play a large part in his fiction from this point on.  A poor farmer, Lemuel Barker, comes to Boston with dreams of becoming a poet.  Instead, his naïveté leaves him an easy mark, and he is soon...

Example in this ebook   WHENEVER I visit the region of a famous man’s youth I have the feeling that I ought to discover there some clue to the secret of his greatness; for I cannot help fancying that the environment must have molded him and been an essential element in the development...

It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems a cataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the opposite quarter. It is so divinable, if not so perceptible, that its presence may usually be recognized as a beginning of the turn in every tide which is sure, sooner or later,...

To the perverse all courtships probably are quaint; but if ever human nature may be allowed the full range of originality, it may very well be in the exciting and very personal moments of making love. Our own peculiar social structure, in which the sexes have so much innocent freedom, and youth is left...