"Howells" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... American drama was never very pronounced. He sought Boker's "Francesca da Rimini," as he sought W.D. Howells' "Yorick's Love" (given at Cleveland, Ohio, October 26, 1878), because the roles therein suited his temperament. Between him and Boker, there was some misunderstanding of short duration, about royalties, but this was bridged over, and ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... and coarse phases of life as something to look at and study, but not to bring into the heart and love. George Eliot loves her characters, has an intense affection for them, pours out her motherliness upon them. Not so Daudet or James or Howells, who study crude life on the surface, and because it is the fashion. There is no heart-nearness in their work, little of passionate human desire to do justice to phases of life hitherto neglected. She has in this regard the genius of Scott and Hugo, who live in and with their characters, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... whose imagination concerns itself with supernatural phenomena, especially in the doings of spooks. One of the most illustrious spookers of our time is Mr. William D. Howells, who introduces a well-credentialed reader to as respectable and mannerly a company of spooks as one could wish to meet. To the terror that invests the chairman of a district school board, the Howells ghost adds something of the mystery enveloping a ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Shot-gun Smith. But what a pity we shall soon have no more Mrs. Brewtons! The causes that produced her—slavery, isolation, literary tendencies, adversity, game blood—that combination is broken forever. I shall speak to Mr. Howells about her. She ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... bird-shops, that she could "buy the whole collection and set 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 difficulties of ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... cropped back from the size of a tree 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 ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... curley maple. Hickory ramrod. Barrel is octagon, rifled deeply and about .32 calibre. Brass and German silver mountings. Barrel marked "Fleeger, Allegheny". Lock marked "Howells, Philadelphia." Possibly made for some riverboat captain or river gambler, and may have ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... (one of them Lord Wolseley), one admiral, four baronets, nine knights, a crowd of right honorable and honorable ladies (many of them peeresses), and a mob of other personages, among whom I find Mr. Howells, Bret ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... acquaintance to discuss us. Mr. Owen Wister 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
... race of accomplished women and honor-deserving men. One daughter married the Hon. John Noyes, of New Hampshire, who served in Congress 1817-19, and died in 1841, at Putney, Vermont. A daughter of this marriage is the mother of Larkin G. Meade, the sculptor; whose sister is the wife of William D. Howells, the novelist, and present editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Another daughter of Rutherford and Chloe Smith Hayes married the Hon. Samuel Elliott, of Vermont, who attained distinction in Congress and ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... he was to see the man around whose head the boy's youthful reading had cast a sort of halo. And when he saw the head itself he had a feeling that he could see the halo. No kindlier pair of eyes ever looked at a boy, as, with a smile, "the white Mr. Longfellow," as Mr. Howells had called him, ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... love-story, a little April comedy, which I ought certainly to hand over to the author of "A Chance Acquaintance," for he could write it as it should be written, and I am sure (although I mean to try) that I cannot.—But who would have supposed that a Brownie of mine should invent a tale for Mr. Howells? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in New York, to 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 it were, carried across the broad Atlantic. German solids and ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... lights, yet real stars, that have blazed in this generation are Reade, Kingsley, Black, James, Trollope, Cooper, Howells, Wallace, and a multitude of others, in France and Germany as well as England and America, to say nothing of the thousands who have aspired and failed as artists, yet who have succeeded in securing readers and in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... only in emotions with which they are familiar by experience. Howells's refined love-scenes have often been sneered at by men who like raw whiskey but cannot appreciate the delicate bouquet of Chambertin. As Professor Ribot remarks: in the higher regions of science, art, religion, and morals there are emotions so ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 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
... well 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
... review of The Kentons, and shall be pleased to send you a long succession of novels for analysis if you can always use the scalpel with such atrocious cunning as in this case. I say atrocious cunning, for really you have treated Mr. Howells with a touch of that genial "process of vivisection" to which it pleases him to subject the lively creatures of his ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... 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
... sleepy, and that my head is still its normal size, although I have at last found one man in Boston who has read one of my stories, and that was Barrymore from New York. The Fairchilds' dinner was a tremendous affair, and I was conquered absolutely by Mr. Howells, who went far, far out of his way to be as kind and charming as an old man could be. Yesterday Mrs. Whitman gave a tea in her studio. I thought she meant to have a half dozen young people to drink a cup with her, and I sauntered in in the most nonchalant manner ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... people I saw a good deal of at that time in Bermuda was "Mark Twain," who had, however, begun to fail, and that most cultivated and delightful of men, the late William Dean Howells. I twice met at luncheon a gentleman who, I was told, might possibly be adopted as Democratic Candidate for the Presidency of the United States. His ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... just published, on "Cambrian Superstitions," by Mr. Howells, several are mentioned so exactly similar to those prevalent in Ireland, Scotland, and England, as to leave no doubt of their common origin. The Welsh coast has also its spectre-ships, like America and the seas of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... Sketched by George du Maurier. With an Introduction by William Dean Howells. Oblong 4to, Cloth, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... 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 ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... gentlemen when they leave a room "push aside the portieres." Sometimes the "rings jingle." He has in most instances mercifully spared us further descriptions of the interiors of New York houses at this epoch.... At a dinner party one of the guests refers to Howells as the "foremost novelist who is never read." The book is dedicated to "Cherubina, dulcissime rerum." Saltus returned to the central theme of "Enthralled" in a story called "The Impostor," printed in ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Mr. W. D. Howells says in the North American Review: "What I should finally say of his work is that it is more broadly based than that of any other American novelist of his generation.... Mr. Herrick's fiction is a force ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... ought to precede me into the dining room. Graham Robertson was on my left. He was jolly too, kept on producing wonderful rings and stones out of his pockets. He said he wished he could go about covered in the pieces of a chandelier. The other guests were lady Seton, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Mr. W. W. Howells and his daughter (too Burne-Jonesy to be really attractive), Mr. Taylor (police magistrate), and Mrs. Eichholz (Mrs. Lane's mother) who is more beautiful than anything except a wee baby. In fact, she looks exactly like one, so dainty and small. She can never at any time have been as pretty ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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 ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... 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 her ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... 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
... of life in that capacity he has cultivated his poetical talents so successfully that his verse has found frequent admission into leading magazines. At last a little collection of these verses reached William Dean Howells, and Mr. Dunbar's star at once became ascendant. He is said to be a full-blooded Negro, the son of slave-parents, and his best work is in the dialect of his race. A volume of his poems is soon to be published by Dodd, Mead & Co. and in ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... use of stimulants at work; and anyone who has read 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 ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... note that in thanking Clemens for his compliment Howells wrote: "What people cannot see is that I analyze as little as possible; they go on talking about the analytical school, which I am supposed to belong to, and I want to thank you for using your eyes..... Did you ...
— Widger's Quotations from Albert Bigelow Paine on Mark Twain • David Widger
... not time to visit the university, which as late as 1864 had over a thousand students. Howells, writing some years ago, says, "They were to be met everywhere; one could not be mistaken with the blended air of pirate and dandy these studious young men assumed. They were to be seen a good deal on the ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... perfect short story. It is, however, in good literary standing and in good favor with the public, and it is most excellent practice for the tyro, for in it he has to sink himself completely in his characters. Examples: Hope's "The Dolly Dialogues;" Kipling's "The Story of the Gadsbys;" and Howells' one act parlor plays, like "The Parlor Car," "The Register," "The Letter," and ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... ghost in bumptious Boston! Do the souls of men whose books, So they tell us, outshine DICKENS, rise superior to "spooks"? Do the phantoms, having read them, fly in terror and in pain At the cult of vivisection of La belle Americaine? HOWELLS puffs up DUDLEY WARNER, who declares his HOWELLS fine. Do the spectres hate "log-rolling," and to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... praise? Then let me echo William Dean Howells: "I know very well that I do not speak of Tolstoy's books in measured terms; ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a "loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slaveholding Mississippi river town." Young Clemens accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of course, for his father was a slave-owner; and his mother's wedding dowry consisted ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... to the imperious voice of convention. And the novelists follow the same path as the historians. Mr Henry James, in his patient analysis of human character, has evoked such subtle harmonies as our English speech has not known before. Mr Howells, even when he finds his material in the land of his birth, shows himself the master of a classic style, exquisite in balance and perfect in tone. And both share the common inheritance of our tongue, are links in the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... reading world with acclamation rings For my last book. It led the list at Weir, Altoona, Rahway, Painted Post, Hot Springs: Great literature is with us year on year. "The Bookman" gives me a vociferous cheer. Howells approves. I can no higher climb. Bring, then, the laurel: crown my bright career— Why do we ever ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... 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 ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... now beside 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 ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... Mr. Howells has said that we are all so besotted with our novel reading that we have lost the power of seeing certain aspects of life with any sense of reality because we are continually looking for the possible romance. The description might apply to the earlier years of the American settlement, but certainly ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... women far more jealously than over that of men. It is as a result of this vigilance of centuries that women have, among civilized nations, a finer sense of modesty than men, and a higher standard of personal purity. Men are, as yet, as Mr. Howells remarks, "imperfectly monogamous;" and Bjoernson is, no doubt, in the main right in the tremendous indictment he frames against them ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that wealth was simply ability legitimately funded and transmitted. Even modern humanitarians, while dallying with the equation wealth spoliation, have been unwilling wholly to relinquish the historic view of the case. I have always admired the courage with which Mr. Howells faced the situation in one of those charming essays for the Easy Chair of Harper's. Driving one night in a comfortable cab he was suddenly confronted by the long drawn out misery of the midnight bread line. For a moment the vision of these hungry fellow men overcame him. He felt guilty on ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... to public amusements, we have to look quite as closely and distrustfully at the action of the reformers as we have at the action of the kind gentlefolk who are going to give us "Daniel Deronda" and the highly entertaining works of Mr. William Deans Howells in place of the dear welcome stories that pass away the long hours. Let it be understood that I do not wish to say one word likely to be construed into a jeer at real culture; but I must, as a matter of mercy, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... 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 pp. $1.25. ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... letters. As a work of architecture, for instance, "Virgin Soil" bears the same relation to the "Mill on the Floss" that the Capitol at Washington bears to the Capitol at Albany. The one is a rounded-out thing of beauty, the other an angular monstrosity. Walter Scott in England, and Mr. Howells in America, are the only English writers of fiction who possess that sense of form which makes Turgenef's art consummate; unfortunately, Walter Scott has long since been discarded as a literary model, and Mr. Howells is ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... varied studies in lectures such as it is not often the privilege of college students to hear. That pulling in the yoke of this steady occupation was sometimes galling is shown in his private letters. To W.D. Howells he wrote regretfully of the time and energy given to teaching, and of his conviction that he would have been a better poet if he "had not estranged the muse by donning a professor's gown." But a good teacher always bears in his left ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... was "What to Do?" It was much discussed, though not very new. It will be remembered that in the final chapter of that work he argues that woman's whole duty consists in marrying and having as large a family as possible. But, in speaking of Mr. Howells's "The Undiscovered Country," which he had just discovered, —it was odd to think he had never heard of Mr. Howells before,—he remarked, in connection with the Shakers, that "it was a good thing that ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... 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 there, Bridges. ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar
... Tennessee, in 1850. For 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 ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Government even was jealous of its power. It repeatedly tried to banish one of its editors, and finally did send him off to the court of Madrid [James Russell Lowell]. And I am told that the present editor [William Dean Howells] might have been snatched away from it, but for his good fortune in being legally connected with a person who is distantly related to a very high personage who was at that time reforming the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Hooligan, then is Kipling the voice of the 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 ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the Old Masters. Being her own Compositions and Inventions in Sacred and Legendary Art. With Introduction and Commentary by W.D. Howells. Oblong. ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... thought that these essays show no sympathy with liberal ideas. He was also appreciative of the first works of new writers, and had good and prophetic insight. His favorable reviews of the first works of Howells and James, and the subsequent career of these two men, indicate the sureness of Lowell's critical mind. Many readers will enjoy, in these days of the ouija board and messages from the dead, the raps at ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... heart, and it is upon the human heart that the tale constrains one's interest. The Lang Men o' Larut is just a yarn spun for the yarn's sake: it informs us of nothing, and is closely related (if I may use some of Mr. Howells' expressive language for the occasion) to "the lies swapped between men after the ladies have left the table." And the reason why the story-teller, when (as will happen at times) his invention runs dry, can take no comfort in the generous outpourings of his unknown ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... become a part of their organization. When Horace E. Scudder, in 1898, resigned the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, Page succeeded him. Thus Page became the successor of James Russell Lowell, James T. Fields, William D. Howells, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich as the head of this famous periodical. This meant that he had reached the top of his profession. He was now forty-three ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick |
