"Howells" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Remember how Nathaniel Hawthorne speaks about the English people among whom he lived; read how Thoreau speaks of us when he visits Quebec. Is that time past? Hardly. Among the better class of Americans one seldom finds any trace of hatred to Great Britain. I think that, with the exception of Mr. W.D. Howells, I have never found any American gentleman who would manifest such a passion. But, as regards the lower class of Americans, it is reported that there still survives a meaningless, smouldering hostility. The going and the coming, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... like that of her husband, is self-acquired, but I have met few people in any walk of life with the same wide and thorough range of thought. In their home oft-quoted volumes of Spencer, Darwin, Fiske, Carlyle, Ibsen, Valdes, Howells, give evidence that they not only keep abreast but ahead of the current thought of the day. Spencer is their philosopher, and Howells is their novelist, but Dickens and Scott have large space on their shelves. All this does not prevent Mr. Herne from being an incorrigible ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... all, this theory explains why it is so very hard to recall with vividness the persons of our later fiction. Humour is not the strong point of novelists to-day. There may be amateurs who know Mr. Howells's characters as their elders know Sophia and Amelia and Catherine Seyton—there may be. To the old reader of romance, however earnestly he keeps up with modern fiction, the salt of life seems often lacking in its puppets or its persons. ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... necessarily lack in perspective. Arnold's Life deals chiefly with the executive and legislative history of Lincoln's administration. The Life by the novelist J. G. Holland deals popularly with his hero's personality. The memoirs by Barrett, Abbott, Howells, Bartlett, Hanaford and Power were written in ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Nightingale William Drummond The Nightingale Mark Akenside To the Nightingale John Milton Philomela Philip Sidney Ode to a Nightingale John Keats Song, 'Tis sweet to hear the merry lark Hartley Coleridge Bird Song Laura E. Richards The Song the Oriole Sings William Dean Howells To an Oriole Edgar Fawcett Song: the Owl Alfred Tennyson "Sweet Suffolk Owl" Thomas Vautor The Pewee John Townsend Trowbridge Robin Redbreast George Washington Doane Robin Redbreast William Allingham The Sandpiper Celia Thaxter The Sea-Mew Elizabeth Barrett Browning To a Skylark William ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... or in hiding, and it may be claimed that our little fresh-water college bore a part in initiating a development that has become memorable and widely salutary. In 1872 I wrote out the story of our attempt for Mr. Howells, in the Atlantic Monthly, a film which may appropriately ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... to a bush, or the branch of a tree stuck into the ground and made to serve for a bush. It is another species, destined by the agencies at work in the realm of unconsciousness to be brought into being of its own kind, and not of another,"—W.D. Howells, North American Review, 173:429. ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... Sketched by George du Maurier. With an Introduction by William Dean Howells. Oblong 4to, Cloth, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Messrs. John J. Piatt and W. D. Howells. The readers of the "Atlantic" have already had a taste of the quality of both, and, we hope, will often have the same pleasure again. The volume is a very agreeable one, with little of the crudeness so generally characteristic of first ventures,—not more than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... of instruction or suggestion for those that are interested in child life. Aldrich[3] is better, and we have interesting glimpses of the pet horse and monkeys, of his fighting the boy bully, running way, and falling in love with an older girl whose engagement later blighted his life. Howells,[4] White,[5] Mitter,[6] Grahame,[7] Heidi,[8] and Mrs. Barnett,[9] might perhaps represent increasing grades of merit in this field ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Howells Edgar Allan Poe Walt Whitman Henry James Harold Frederic Kate Chopin Stephen Crane Frank Norris When I Knew Stephen Crane On the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... life are well known and appreciated in England, but the talent of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett is not sufficiently recognised. In her Country of the Pointed Firs, for example, there are whole chapters that rise to a classical perfection of workmanship. The novelists of the Eastern cities, with Mr. Howells, a master craftsman, at their head, are of course numberless. For studies in the local colour of New York nothing could be better than Professor Brander Matthews' Vignettes of Manhattan, and other stories. Mr. Paul Leicester Ford's Honorable Peter Stirling, though antiquated in style, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... excellent workman. He makes us see the quiet of the hills and the allurements of the trout-stream, yet he refrains as scrupulously as Mr. Howells himself from obtruding his own personality. His characters themselves apparently produce the effects due to his skill. His subject-matter is remarkably fresh. Pervading it all is ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. W. D. Howells, an American gentleman who has not been allowed to forget that he once asserted of fiction what Professor Seeley would be glad to be able to assert of history, that the drowsy spell of narrative has been broken. We are to look for no more Sir Walters, no more ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Well, I knew that it was by either Howells or James, I forgot which. They didn't write ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... Hooligan as surely as he is the voice of the nineteenth century. Who is more representative? Is David Harum more representative of the nineteenth century? Is Mary Johnston, Charles Major, or Winston Churchill? Is Bret Harte? William Dean Howells? Gilbert Parker? Who of them all is as essentially representative of nineteenth-century life? When Kipling is forgotten, will Robert Louis Stevenson be remembered for his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his Kidnapped and his David Balfour? Not so. His Treasure Island will ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... more recent types of this white slavery, which has, in one form or another, threatened the masses since the days of old John Ball of early England. Perhaps the strongest portrayal, yet, of many phases of the question, especially those relating to the city, maybe found in Mr. Howells' story, "A Hazard of New Fortunes." For the country, if one really wants to see what is behind the great upheaval in the West, which has its outward manifestation in the Farmers' Alliance, he only needs to read Mr. Hamlin Garland's ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... Since in America." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes studied New England village life in "Elsie Venner," and Sylvester Judd that of the Maine backwoods in "Margaret." Mr. T.W. Higginson has written "Malbone." Mr. W.D. Howells, Rev. Edward Everett Hale, and Miss E.S. Phelps are still adding ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... century. Stevenson's share in this Romantic revival was greater than that of any other English writer, and as an English review remarked, if it had not been for him most of the new authors would have been Howells and James ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Oh, if that is the way you speak, then your case is hopeless! I suspected it for some time, but now I am certain. The trouble! The delight of reading a new novel by Howells is something that you evidently have not the remotest idea of. Why, I don't know what I would give to have with me a novel of Howells' that ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... yesterday, literally yesterday and by chance, and with no thought at the moment of Conwell although he had been much in my mind for some time past, I picked up a thin little book of description by William Dean Howells, and, turning the pages of a chapter on Lexington, old Lexington of the Revolution, written, so Howells had set down, in 1882, I noticed, after he had written of the town itself, and of the long-past fight there, and of the present-day aspect, that he mentioned the church life ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... between nineteen and twenty when my first sketch was accepted by Mr. Howells for the Atlantic. I already counted myself as by no means a new contributor to one or two other magazines—Young Folks and The Riverside—but I had no literary friends ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... to remain in his Room and read something by William Dean Howells, the Friend would compel him to put on his Low-Front and go out to a War-Dance and meet a Bunch of Kioodles who wore No. 6 Hats and talked ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... merely accepting it as the mainspring of their conduct in all relations with other peoples, and without, it is to be feared, much regard for those other peoples' feelings. Americans are still in the boasting stage. Mr. Howells has said that every American when he goes abroad goes not as an individual citizen but as an envoy. He walks wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. It is only the insularity of ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... literary history, or who has had any experience of literary life in London, knows that the rock upon which many men split is—drink. Whatever journalists may gain from alcohol, other writers who have tried it say nothing in its favour. Mr. Howells does not take wine at all, because it weakens his work and his working force. To Mark Twain wine is a clog to the pen, not an inspiration. "I have," he says, "never seen the time when I could write to my satisfaction after drinking even one glass of wine." ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... which he judges his own works, in his letters, shows how little his mind was impressed by the greatness of their fame and of the genius found in them. There could not have been a more modest author, though he did not weakly underrate his work. "Recognition," he once said to Mr. Howells, "makes ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life is given up to love, and then, as we know, he chose a singularly crude and professional person, using her career as a symbol of the Second ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... stories of the Mississippi Valley. A revised edition, with an introduction by W. D. Howells, and frontispiece, headpieces, and cover design by H. T. Carpenter. Printed at the University Press on specially made paper. 16mo. Buckram, gilt top and uncut edges. 251 ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... be a constant visitor at Pfaff's underground delicatessen cafe, then a favourite haunt of the literary and artistic worlds of the metropolis. There she mingled with such accepted celebrities as Walt Whitman, W. Dean Howells, Commodore Vanderbilt, and that other flashing figure, Adah Isaacs Menken. She probably found in Pfaff's a certain resemblance to the Munich beer-halls with which she had been familiar. A bit of the Fatherland, as ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... preparation of this work at p. 315 of our last volume, and there gave a few anticipatory extracts. The author is Mr. W. Howells, of Tipton, whose good fortune it has been to secure a list of Subscribers to his work, of gratifying length and flattering rank. The origin of the volume is curious enough, and is thus ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... of the most inventive of talents, discovering not only a new kind in humor and fancy, but accumulating an inexhaustible wealth of details in each fresh achievement, the least of which would be riches from another hand."—W. D. Howells, in ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN, a popular American novelist, the son of a Swedenborgian journalist, born at Martin's Ferry, Ohio; adopted journalism as a profession, produced a popular Life of Lincoln, and from 1861 to 1865 was Consul ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... despised "Gothick" of Addison—as Mr. Howells puts it—was fast becoming the admired "Gothic" of Scott. This pronunciamento of very advanced romantic doctrine came out several years before Percy's "Reliques" and "The Castle of Otranto." It was only ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Ferguson, Asaph's younger brother, describing his life on the Island at Paris all through the siege. I should have sent it yesterday to Mr. Osgood, who would be delighted to print it in the Atlantic Monthly, but that the spelling is disgraceful. Mr. Osgood and Mr. Howells would think Oliver a fool before they had read down the first page. "L-i-n, lin, n-e-n, nen, linen." Think of that! Oliver would never have spelled "linen" like that if he had been two years a teacher. You can go through four years at Harvard College spelling so, but you cannot ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... satirical and lyric poet and critic of the eighteenth century, in Il Giorno (The Day), gives a delightful pen picture of the manners and customs of Milan's polite society of the period. William Dean Howells quotes as follows from these poems (his own translation) in his Modern Italian Poets. The feast is over, and the lady signals to the cavalier that it is ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... known how much the health of any one part of us depends upon all the others. The theme of one of Howells's novels is the steady mental, moral, and physical degeneration of a man from eating a piece of cold mince-pie at midnight, and the sequence of steps by which he is led down is a very natural process. Indeed, how much irritability and unkindness might be traced to chronic indigestion, ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... the English side of the Irish Sea could possibly have suggested the establishment of a Saint's Day in honor of the late respected Warden of Racine College, or seriously have proposed that Messrs. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Russell Lowell, Henry James, and W. D. Howells be appointed a jury of "literary arbitrament" to sit in judgment on the liturgical language of The Book Annexed; and this out of respect to our proper national pride. Doubtless it would add perceptibly to the amused sense of the unfitness ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... fifteen years she spent her summers in the Tennessee mountains among the people of whom she writes. Her pen name of Charles Egbert Craddock deceived her publishers into the belief that she was a man. Both Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich accepted her stories for the Atlantic Monthly without suspecting her sex, and Aldrich was a surprised man the day she entered his office and introduced herself as ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... who appeal with certainty and success to the popular taste in the tales of spectral terrors. Witness: Farjeon's The Turn of the Screw; Bierce's The Damned Thing; Bulwer's A Strange Story; Cranford's Witch of Prague; Howells' The Shadow of a Dream; Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme; Grusot's Night Side of Nature; Crockett's Black Douglas; and The Red Axe, Francis' Lychgate Hall; Caine's The Shadow of a Crime; and countless other stories, ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... and Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison have discussed us with each other, and bandied names to and fro rather uncritically. And Mr. Robert Herrick has endeavored to reassure us kindly and a little wistfully. Mr. Stephens has scolded us, and Mr. Howells and Mr. Alden have counselled us wisely. And many others have ventured opinions and offered judgment. The general verdict against American literature is Guilty! Is ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Mark wrote many minor items, most of them rejected by Howells, and read extensively in one of his favorite books, Pepys' Diary. Like many another writer Mark was captivated by Pepys' style and spirit, and "he determined," says Albert Bigelow Paine in his 'Mark Twain, A Biography', "to try his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Mr. W.D. Howells, in an article written just after the novelist's death, said:[3]—"It was my good fortune to have the courage to write to du Maurier when Trilby was only half printed, and to tell him how much I liked the gay sad story. In every way ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... have frequently dilated on the charms attending a study of the reports of State Trials, as they are best known to the world; namely, in one-and-twenty stately volumes compiled by the industrious Howells, father and son, and published, a year after the battle of Waterloo, by the combined efforts of on a few of my contemporaries the idea that persons long since dead on the block or the gallows were Englishmen very much like ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... rule has worked better than any one would have dared hope. Owing, also, to the exceptionally respectful and chivalrous nature of American men, it has been possible for a young lady to travel unattended from Maine to Georgia, or anywhere within the new geographical limits of our social growth. Mr. Howells founded a romance upon this principle, that American women do not need a chaperon. Yet we must remember that all the black sheep are not killed yet, and we must also remember that propriety must be more attended to as we cease to be a young and primitive nation, and as we enter the lists ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... Months in Italy,"—a work that to this day holds precedence as a clear and comprehensive presentation of the scenic beauty, the notable monumental and architectural art, and the general life and resources of this land of painter and poet. Other names, too, throng upon memory—that of William Dean Howells, painting Italian life in his "Venetian Days," and charming all the literary world by his choice art; and among later work, the interesting interpretations of Rome and of social life in Rome, by Marion Crawford, Henry James, and Richard Bagot,—in chronicle, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... them all free,"—a desire which suggests a quaint vision of her in Seven Dials, with a mixed flock of macaws, canaries, parrots and thrushes shrieking and flying round her head; but the wish was worthy of her in (what Mr. Howells called) "woman's heaven-born ignorance of the insuperable ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... is the youngest child of a family of four born to the late G. H. M. Johnson (Onwanonsyshon), Head Chief of the Six Nations Indians, and his wife, Emily S. Howells, a lady of pure English parentage, her birth-place being Bristol, England, but the land of ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... than William Dean Howells has said of him, "Excepting always my dear Whitcomb Riley, Edwin Markham is the first of the Americans." "The greatest poet of the century" is the estimate of Ella Wheeler Wilcox; and Francis Grierson adds, "Edwin Markham is one of the greatest poets of the age, ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing. I am describing the impression left upon me by Mr. Howells's blank-verse sketch called "Father and Mother: A Mystery"—a strangely touching and imaginative piece of work, not unlike in effect to some of Maeterlinck's psychical dramas. As I read on, I seemed to be standing in a shadow cast by some half-remembered experience ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... hotel office, the evening of a first day's lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say, to my great amaze and happiness, "Hello, here's Howells!" ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... me Howells's "Doctor Breen's Practice." It is a remarkable attempt to do justice to a very difficult subject, for there are two physicians to handle, male and female, not, I think, after their kind. "Doctor Zay," by Miss Phelps, makes absurd a book which is ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... at him with exasperation, and then gathered up a stack of memorandums and letters, his own envelope atop it. She came out of the press secretary's office two minutes later with Howells himself, and Howells said: "You ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar
... Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Warner, Burroughs, Howells, and Trowbridge are used by permission of and by special arrangement with Hoaghton, Mifflin, and Company, publishers of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... "Mr. William D. Howells, who during his recent residence in Boston gave much of his valuable time as a visitor for the Associated Charities, was amused one day to be told, on knocking at the door of a house where he had studiously endeavored ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... managers who examined it declared it to be as strong as and no less powerful than any American drama yet written. The character of the audience was as striking as the play was brave and original. It was, indeed, a strange sight to see such well-known and thoughtful men and women as Mr. William Dean Howells, Rev. Minot J. Savage, Rabbi Solomon Schindler, Rev. Edward A. Horton, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, Hamlin Garland, and a score or more of persons almost as well known in literary, religious, and thoughtful circles, assembled on the first ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... may be seen plaiting straw and making bonnets and hats. Mrs. Davis and the ladies of her household are frequently seen sitting on the front porch engaged in this employment. Ostentation cannot be attributed to them, for only a few years ago the Howells were in humble condition and ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... spring of 1898, after finishing my LIFE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, I began to plan to go into the Klondike over the Telegraph Trail. One day in showing the maps of my route to William Dean Howells, I said, "I shall go in here and come out there," a trail of nearly twelve hundred miles through an almost unknown country. As I uttered this I suddenly realized that I was starting on a path holding many perils and that ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... better insight, and wean us away from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched culture—as it calls itself—is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. He was reluctant, for he was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly toward them, and he remains so to this day. But I persuaded him. He had great confidence in me, and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not believe myself. ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain |
