William Dean Howells

The Sleeping-Car, a farce by William Dean Howells. The Sleeping Car is a farce play in three parts by William Dean Howells, first published in the United States in 1883. This play takes place entirely within a 24-hour period on a railway sleeping car, and revolves around a woman's late night confusion regarding the premature appearance of her husband and brother.

Howells wrote several captivating travel books, including Italian Journeys, Venetian Life, and Certain Delightful English Towns. Here, he turns his observant and sometimes critical eye to London, presenting a series of sketches of the city as if they were mental movies.

"You have done nothing more true and complete," wrote Henry James about William Dean Howells's novel The Kentons. Here, Howells follows a Midwestern family as they travel first to New York and then to Holland-in order to take the daughter, Ellen, away from an abusive relationship. Along the way they explore the contrasts between their Ohio manners and those of the regions they visit, a familiar theme in Howells's work.

At the New York City gentlemen's club known as the Turkish Room, members gathered to tell stories of psychic phenomena and the supernatural. This 1903 departure for the "Dean of American Realism" includes three novellas: "His Apparition," "The Angel of the Lord," and "Though One Rose from the Dead."

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 destitute. A minister, Sewell, is forced to consider his own complicity in Barker's fate . . . and by extension that of all his less-fortunate fellows.

From his perch as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, author, editor, and literary critic William Dean Howells discussed his theories of realism in literature in his column, "The Editor's Study." Highly influential, this collection of Howells's essays and ideas is an invaluable resource for any reader or student with a passion for literature.

The collaborative efforts of twelve different authors writing a chapter each, The Whole Family is a 1908 novel conceived of by writer William Dean Howells and directed by Elizabeth Jordan, the editor Harper's Bazaar at the time. Howells' wished to explore how an entire family might both affect and be affected by a marriage. The narrative became somewhat of a mirror for the at-times contentious relationships between its various authors. The

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Should a son who's delusional about his dead father be told the truth-that in fact, his father was a scoundrel who tyrannized his wife? That's the ethical dilemma in this tale by author William Dean Howells, dealing with questions of loyalty, honor, family, and honesty.