William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells

Author: Susan Goodman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2005-05-01

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 052093024X

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Possibly the most influential figure in the history of American letters, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was, among other things, a leading novelist in the realist tradition, a formative influence on many of America's finest writers, and an outspoken opponent of social injustice. This biography, the first comprehensive work on Howells in fifty years, enters the consciousness of the man and his times, revealing a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism. Written with verve and originality in a highly absorbing style, it brings alive for a new generation a literary and cultural pioneer who played a key role in creating the American artistic ethos. William Dean Howells traces the writer's life from his boyhood in Ohio before the Civil War, to his consularship in Italy under President Lincoln, to his rise as editor of Atlantic Monthly. It looks at his writing, which included novels, poems, plays, children's books, and criticism. Howells had many powerful friendships among the literati of his day; and here we find an especially rich examination of the relationship between Howells and Mark Twain. Howells was, as Twain called him, "the boss" of literary critics—his support almost single-handedly made the careers of many writers, including African Americans like Paul Dunbar and women like Sarah Orne Jewett. Showcasing many noteworthy personalities—Henry James, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and many others—William Dean Howells portrays a man who stood at the center of American literature through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Letters, Fictions, Lives
Letters, Fictions, Lives

Author: Michael Anesko

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1997-08-28

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 0195362926

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In this unique and long-awaited volume, Michael Anesko documents the literary cross-fertilization between Henry James and William Dean Howells, collecting 151 letters, nearly all the extant correspondence between the two men, as well as the most significant critical commentary James wrote on Howells and Howells wrote on James. Scholars have long recognized the peculiar importance of the relationship between these two exponents of realistic fiction--their mutual respect and occasional animosity. But the record of their affinities and substantial differences has never before been so amply and compellingly established. Containing dozens of previously unpublished letters by James, and featuring a detailed biographical chronology as well as extensive interpretive commentaries that meticulously chart the development of this remarkable literary friendship, Letters, Fictions, Lives, edited to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, will prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of James and Howells, and will hold great interest for dedicated readers of their fiction and for those studying epistolary issues and literary influence between contemporaries.

The Life of Mark Twain
The Life of Mark Twain

Author: Gary Scharnhorst

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2019-05-30

Total Pages: 779

ISBN-13: 0826274307

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Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 The second volume of Gary Scharnhorst’s three-volume biography chronicles the life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens between his move with his family from Buffalo to Elmira (and then Hartford) in spring 1871 and their departure from Hartford for Europe in mid-1891. During this time he wrote and published some of his best-known works, including Roughing It, The Gilded Age, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi,Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Significant events include his trips to England (1872–73) and Bermuda (1877); the controversy over his Whittier Birthday Speech in December 1877; his 1878–79 Wanderjahr on the continent; his 1882 tour of the Mississippi valley; his 1884–85 reading tour with George Washington Cable; his relationships with his publishers (Elisha Bliss, James R. Osgood, Andrew Chatto, and Charles L. Webster); the death of his son, Langdon, and the births and childhoods of his daughters Susy, Clara, and Jean; as well as the several lawsuits and personal feuds in which he was involved. During these years, too, Clemens expressed his views on racial and gender equality and turned to political mugwumpery; supported the presidential campaigns of Grover Cleveland; advocated for labor rights, international copyright, and revolution in Russia; founded his own publishing firm; and befriended former president Ulysses S. Grant, supervising the publication of Grant’s Memoirs. The Life of Mark Twain is the first multi-volume biography of Samuel Clemens to appear in more than a century and has already been hailed as the definitive Twain biography.

Knights of the Golden Rule
Knights of the Golden Rule

Author: Peter J. Frederick

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-15

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0813162890

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This is a book about American intellectuals as would-be social reformers and what happens to them in the arena of practical politics. Specifically, it examines the lives of ten highly idealistic Christian socialist and anarchist intellectuals of the 1890s who were profoundly influenced—indeed inspired—by the prophetic social messages and exemplary lives of Tolstoy, Mazzini, and Ruskin. The ten Americans—including ministers, journalists, professors, and poets—were constantly thwarted in their efforts to apply the Golden Rule and the ethics of Jesus not only to the socioeconomic institutions of their society, but to their own lives as well. These ten Christian knights rode high on clouds of words, carrying swords of good intentions, tilting at windmills often of their own despair. As a result, they paid the price (as Emerson said) of being "too intellectual." This is, indeed, a story of noble dreams, frustration, agonizing self-doubts and, ultimately, of failure. Peter J. Frederick develops his argument by comparing and contrasting the intellectuals in pairs, examining the many forms frustrated activism can take. His study emerges as a critique of the Social Gospel movement from a New Left perspective; implicitly, it is a critique of the contemporary New Left, approached with empathetic understanding. Ethical, decisive action, he concludes, is essential not only for effective reform but for the psychic well-being of the intellectual.

The Mark Twain Encyclopedia
The Mark Twain Encyclopedia

Author: J. R. LeMaster

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 952

ISBN-13: 9780824072124

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A reference guide to the great American author (1835-1910) for students and general readers. The approximately 740 entries, arranged alphabetically, are essentially a collection of articles, ranging significantly in length and covering a variety of topics pertaining to Twain's life, intellectual milieu, literary career, and achievements. Because so much of Twain's writing reflects Samuel Clemens's personal experience, particular attention is given to the interface between art and life, i.e., between imaginative reconstructions and their factual sources of inspiration. Each entry is accompanied by a selective bibliography to guide readers to sources of additional information. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR