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Literary Friends and Acquaintance; a Personal Retrospect of American Authorship By: William Dean Howells (1837-1920) |
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by William Dean Howells CONTENTS: Biographical
My First Visit to New England
First Impressions of Literary New York
Roundabout to Boston
Literary Boston As I Knew It
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The White Mr. Longfellow
Studies of Lowell
Cambridge Neighbors
A Belated Guest
My Mark Twain LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to
write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives
of its great exemplars during the twenty five years I lived near them. In
fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I let
the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save
such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but
not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work.
Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and,
though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my
impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to
impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring
to share them with the reader. The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
earliest eighteen nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay
under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first
years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that
periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it
had been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and it
was therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine. It was the paper
with which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt
it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend,
the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting
in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must
do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect
of portraiture; and this I did my best to do. It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look
upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes
often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his
forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly
literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New
England in quality. While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes less
slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in
Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many other
things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories,
with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I had
not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete my
reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it. When they
were all done at last they were republished in a volume which found
instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own. There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends and
Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remained
satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more
accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call
the book by that name who likes. Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of
the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly
after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing
to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of
1910... Continue reading book >>
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