LITMIR.BIZ

'The Vacation of the Kelwyns' was written at the time of his greatest literary activity but for purely personal reasons was denied publication by him during his lifetime. The exquisite delineation of the New England character, as affected by the Shaker faith, and the delicate love story set against the quaint rural background, will undoubtedly rank this with the most distinguished of Mr. Howells' works.

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Here Mr. Howells reintroduces the charming couple whose honeymoon was described in one of the author's most delightful books, «Their Silver Wedding Journey.» Through Hamburg, Karlsbad, Nuremberg, Weimar, Berlin, Frankfort and Dusseldorf and along the banks of the Rhine the gifted literary necromancer conducts the reader through the eyes of his pleasant middle-aged travelers as they wend their leisurely way through parts of Europe as it was a good many years before the First World War.

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Here William Dean Howells has written down the interesting facts of his life up to the time he went abroad as U. S. consul; and not only the facts , but also the early impressions and numerous influences which went to mold the man and the writer. Born in 1837 , at Martin's Ferry , Ohio , of mingled Welsh, German, English and Irish stock, the young son of a printer and publisher could set type almost from babyhood. Love of reading supplemented irregular schooling. He tells of his first efforts at writing, of the broad religious tolerant spirit in his father's home , of his first experience of politics and the abolitionist movement. The family moved later to Dayton, and the young printer – for he worked hard to help his father – found a new interest here in the theater. In later chapters he pictures the life at the State Capital, Columbus, over a half century ago , with its political and social interests, and describes his own youthful enthusiasms. Here he aided his father in reporting the sessions of the legislature. When the family moved again to Ashtabula, young Howells varied his printing labors with the study of foreign languages. As a reporter for the Cincinnati Gazette and later for the Ohio State Journal he knew and revered the prominent journalists of the Middle West. This chronicling of his early literary successes and his first entrance into the Atlantic Monthly's charmed circle show the future author with his feet firmly set on his life's road.

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There is something delightfully intimate about this miscellany of verse, fiction and study. One has almost the feeling of being invited to draw up a comfortable seat opposite the «Easy Chair» to listen to the words from its depths. Perhaps it is the variety that seems to bring the author nearer, for a number of short unrelated stories offer more opportunity for revelation of personality than a long connected narrative. Perhaps it is because these tales are of the sort in which Mr. Howells could readily let himself out. Perhaps it is because he has long held such a place in our affections that it is difficult to detach his work from himself. At any rate the atmosphere of nearness and friendliness is there. And now our host is off, a kindly twinkle in his eye, upon the delightful tale of «The Daughter of the Storage.» He is laughing, I fear, at a woman's failing, but nobody cares and any way she inherited it from her father, so her mother said. Charlotte's failing was indecision and its first manifestation as well as the beginning of her romance occurred in the storage warehouse whither her parents had betaken themselves to deposit the household gods they could not carry with them to Europe. A generous little boy, the child of the people who were filling the adjoining room had heaped her lap with his toys and Charlotte, aged three, had cried herself to sleep that night because she had not been able to make up her mind on which of her treasures to bestow upon him. After the lapse of years the young people meet again at the storage warehouse and there among the household gods renew their acquaintance. Charlotte still has difficulty about making up her mind or rather, making it up right. In fact she first refuses the young man that the generous little boy has grown into. But unmaking her mind was always easier for Charlotte and so she decides to give the custody of her future waverings into the hands of the «son of the storage.» You will want to laugh at this story and at many of the others in the same gently satirical vein, particularly at the adventures of a man who decides to sell only the best books, of his encounters with infuriated authors, of certain little mirrors arranged to show the feminine portion of the customers just how charming they looked while reading one of the bus! hooks, and of various other innovations in bookselling. «A Return to Favor,» the story of the reform of a tailor who never kept his promises and what came of it, is in the same category. «The Night Before Christmas,» a dialogue between a father and mother exhausted with last minute shopping, has some laughs, but reveals the sawdust in the Christmas doll. Its «shop early» moral is less apropos today than it used to be. Several of the stories are somber. That of «The Boarders» tackles the problem of the woman who tries to make a living taking boarders because she knows how to do nothing else and she knows this least of all. «Somebody's Mother» has for its heroine a dilapidated creature resting in a semi-somnolent state on a doorstep protesting inability to walk—until a policeman appears. Nearly all of the stories raise questions which even Mr. Howells from his seventy-nine years of wisdom has not presumed to answer. The poetry is interesting both for its content and form. The latter is, in several selections, the so-called free verse, but in some there is rhyme. People who usually skip poetry will read these stories of 'every-day life and when they have felt the swaying of the boat and heard the creaking of the tiller in «Captain Dunlevy's Last Voyage» perhaps they will want to try some other little excursions into the poetry world.

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'The Leatherwood God' is a veritable history , for it tells the truth and more than the truth . It satisfies the reader' s demand for facts and it fulfills his cravings for fantasy. It convinces us that the novelist is the true historian and the real biographer, and that such a novelist as Mr. Howells, whether or not he wear the aggressive label of realist, will be considered a leading authority upon the American life of which he writes. He has written many novels during his long literary career, he has described and recorded many aspects of humanity in many parts of the world, but when he returns to his native Ohio he writes a story that is the very essence of his theory of life and a very perfect example of his theory of the novel. 'The Leatherwood God' is history made alive in fiction.

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'The Seen and Unseen at Stratford-on-Avon' is a fantasy in which Mr. Howells enjoys the society of the great dramatist while they leisurely go to various pageants and festivities together. Shakespeare becomes his guest for a week-end and the immortal play wright confides that he «Never felt quite happy about the way people talked of Anne.» The dialogue between them is rich in humor and quite as delicious as anything that the distinguished American author has ever done, putting many of his pungent ideas into the mouth of Shakespeare. There are some lovely descriptive nature bits and the atmosphere of English feeling and history. The showery past is wonderfully mirrored in this characteristically perfect workmanship. Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the book is where Francis Bacon joins them and they all talk together – three hundred years being no impediment to conversation with the Shades conjured up by the author's magic pen, which flows as easily and as convincingly as ever, showing an imagination undimmed by time and a sense of humor as keen as ever. There is no better evidence of his linking the past with the present than in his description of the Moving Picture Show which almost confronted the Shakespeare monument. Only Mr. Howells could have done this whimsical thing.

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Mr. Howells would, we imagine, be the last person in the world to suppose that, in «New Leaf Mills,» he had produced a work in any way comparable with his own masterpieces. But, slight as the new story is, it has all the charm of his inimitable style, and exhales all the sweetness of the personality which has made him the most beloved of our men of letters. He has simply gone back to the time of his Ohio boyhood sixty years ago, and fished out of his recollections the materials for a picture of the way in which simple people then lived on what was then the western fringe of our civilization. He tells the story of Owen Powell and his family, who finds it hard to make a living in town, buys an old mill in the country, with the aim of establishing a cooperative community of the type which then hovered before men's minds as likely to furnish the solution of the social problem. He wishes to turn over a new leaf, and this suggests a name for the enterprise. The plan is given up in the end, and not very much happens in between—there is a house-raising, and a surly miller who resents the intrusion of the new owner, and a hired girl who mysteriously disappears, and that is about all, except a great deal of talk, tinctured with Swedenborgianism, which is Owen Powell's spiritual stay in all his reverses. It is a book which helps us to understand our forbears of a generation or two ago, and is an undeniably veracious transcript of their life.

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Mr. Howells's philosophy in these Easy Chair essays is distinctly of the inclusive order, and the wide range of subjects treated is indicated by the following titles from the thirty-odd that make up the volume: « The Practices and Precepts of Vaudeville,» «The Superiority of Inferiors,» « Unimportance of Women in Republics,» «The Quality of Boston and the Quantity of New York.» Surely Mr. Howells has taken the earth for his possession; but has he not gone up and down in it for seventy-odd years? It is his right to speak and our privilege to listen.

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A young New York novelist receives a letter from a girl asking for the solution of a serial story he is writing, for she is so ill that she does not believe she will live to finish it. His publishers answer the letter in good faith only to find out that it was all a girlish prank. The vanity wounded author writes her a scathing letter. Later at a Long Island house-party he meets her, as she is the hostess's paid assistant to entertain the guests. The unspoken love story that ensues ends most unexpectedly. Mr. Howells's delicate satire and pungent irony is nowhere more apparent than in this skeleton romance. He sees the weakness and absurdity of human nature as unerringly as he does its strength and weakness and one closes the book feeling it to be merciless but masterly.

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