From Publishers Weekly
The subtitle of this estimable biography holds the key to its significance. Howells's close involvement with the Cambridge group (Longfellow, Hawthorne, Emerson and their peers), his lifelong friendship with Henry James and Samuel Clemens, his editorship of the
Atlantic Monthly, his outspoken espousal of social and racial equality, his denunciation of a corrupt judicial system, especially during the Haymarket trials of 1886, and his mentoring of black and female writers, make him an important historical figure. In his day, Howells (1837–1920) was America's most popular novelist and one of its most eminent public figures. His novels were harbingers of the new literary realism, aimed at portraying the commonplace lives of ordinary people, while sagely considering the public issues of his day. Plagued all his life by the need to support his father and siblings, afflicted by the tragedy of a daughter's death and a wife's chronic illness, Howells was prolific as much out of financial need as literary ambition. Goodman and Dawson, both professors of English at the University of Delaware, write with verve and a fine understanding of the way literary figures once commanded the type of adulation we now accord to entertainment celebrities. Wide-ranging and assiduously researched, this biography serves as an illuminating portrait of literary America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 47 b&w photos.
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From Booklist
Mark Twain once marveled at how the personality of nineteenth-century writer William Dean Howells entailed "such a difference between the real man and the artificial." In the first major biography of Howells in decades, Goodman and Dawson probe the complex and often-misunderstood psychology connecting the real man with the artificial. Howells invested considerable effort, the authors show, in constructing his public image as an affable man of letters, but that sanitized interpretation made it easy for naturalists such as Norris and Lewis to attack him as the genteel guardian of the status quo. Goodman and Dawson deliver Howells from such attacks by exposing the often-darker but always more substantive figure behind the sanguine public image. Readers see, for example, how the critic associated with prudery boldly pioneered realistic fiction as well as how the outspoken champion of distinctively American literature challenged his country to open up to Zola and Tolstoy. Surprising ambiguities and tensions even show up in Howells' abiding friendship with Twain. A compelling portrait of a literary titan.
Bryce ChristensenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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