"Howells" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reads and 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 of my own in a previous ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... became in later life quite conservative and academic, it should not be 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 spiritualism here and ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... 1879, a dispensary for women and children was opened in Cincinnati, by Drs. Ellen M. Kirk, and M. May Howells, graduates of the New York College and Hospital for Women. Their undertaking proving successful, with other ladies of wealth and ability they soon after established a hospital. November 1, 1881, the certificate of incorporation[304] ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... carefully and finish painstakingly is very necessary, but the great artist must forget how to draw before he paints a great picture; just as every strong writer must put the grammar upon the shelf before he writes well. I once heard William Dean Howells say that any good, bright High-School girl of sixteen could pass a far better examination in rhetoric than he could—and the admission did ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... but he couldn't be duller than Henry James, with his everlasting stories, full of people who talk a great deal and amount to nothing. I like the older novels best, and enjoy some of Scott's and Miss Edgeworth's better than Howells's, or any of the modern realistic writers, with their elevators, and paint-pots, and every-day people," said Alice, who wasted ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 night of a dramatic ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... reputation as a writer. When her place in the literary ranks was so assured that the Saturday Evening Post accepted her stories without so much as reading them; when everybody was asking "Who is this brilliant writer?—this combination of O. Henry, Edith Wharton, and W.D. Howells?" then, and only then, would she come out from behind her nom-de-plume and assume her position as Mrs. Jarvis Jocelyn, wife of ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... 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 ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... war with a somewhat more extended account of the two favorite novelists whose work has done more than any thing else to shape the movement of recent fiction. These are Henry James, Jr., and William Dean Howells. Their writings, though dissimilar in some respects, are alike in this, that they are analytic in method and realistic in spirit. Cooper was a romancer pure and simple; he wrote the romance of ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... observes Howells in his 'Modern Italian Poets,' "in greater degree than any other Italian poet of this, or perhaps of any age, those merits which our English taste of this time demands,—quickness of feeling and brilliancy of expression. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Bayard Taylor, Bret Harte, William D. Howells, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as Unitarians, no merely sectarian aim is in view. In the common use of the word, Hawthorne was not a religious man; for he rarely attended church, and he had no interest in ecclesiastical formalities. No man who has written in this country, however, was more deeply influenced ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... was led by the worthy seneschal into a singular octagonal boudoir, hung with soft dark blue arras. The only person in the room was a gaunt, middle-aged lady, in deep mourning. Though I knew no more of the British aristocracy than Mr. W. D. Howells, of New York, I recognized her for the Duchess by her nose, which resembled those worn by the duchesses of Mr. Du Maurier. As soon as we were alone, she rose, drew me to her bosom, much to my horror, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... century tradition, the conversation of the select circle. Its accents were heard in Steele and Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles Lamb. Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise. It is mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite modulation. With instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and sound style upon fresh American material. In "Rip van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" he ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... large investment company in Wilmington, North Carolina, to find it wearing, at three in the afternoon, the deserted look of a New York office between twelve and one o'clock. Every one had gone home to dinner. Mr. W.D. Howells, in his charming essay on Charleston, makes mention of ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... paths, not stirring up, even there, any more dust than is necessary. If my friends and acquaintances ever go to Venice, let them read their Ruskin, their Goethe, their Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, their Rogers, Gautier, Michelet, their Symonds and Howells, not forgetting old "Coryat's Crudities," and be thankful I spared ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... at New York he visited Boston, dining with the Saturday Club and visiting Howells, then editor of the Atlantic, at Cambridge. He spent a pleasant week, meeting Lowell, Longfellow, and Emerson. Mrs. Aldrich, in "Crowding Memories," gives a vivid picture of his charm and high spirits at this meeting of friends and celebrities. The Boston ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... "colonial" style, "Men of Iron," "A Modern Aladdin," Oliver Wendell Holmes' "One-Horse Shay," are other fairly recent volumes. His illustrations have not been confined to his own stories as "In the Valley," by Harold Frederic, "Stops of Various Quills" (poems by W. D. Howells), go ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... from Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Warner, Burroughs, Howells, and Trowbridge are used by permission of and by special arrangement with Hoaghton, Mifflin, and Company, publishers ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... accuracy displayed by our best fiction writers. A well known society woman, familiar with its usages both at home and abroad, declares that "a course of Anthony Trollope is as good as a London season," and we all know that Howells and James and other authors of that ilk have lifted the portieres of our own drawing rooms and shown us what is transpiring therein. Gail Hamilton says that to be "well-smattered" is next best to being deeply learned, and nowhere can a smattering of ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... yourself KNOW how true this is. It prints more and better short stories, and it contains more pages and more and better paintings. Its serious articles are written at FIRST HAND by the great scientists, historians, and explorers themselves. Mark Twain writes only for Harper's; W.D. Howells writes only for Harper's; Henry James writes only for Harper's; and Howard Pyle, Edwin A. Abbey, and other great artists ...
— Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals • D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency
... I was chosen a member of the famous Saturday Club. I always attended the meetings when I could be in Boston until after the death of my brother, when every man who was a member when I was chosen was dead, except Mr. Norton and Judge Gray and the younger Agassiz and Mr. Howells, and all of them had ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... interesting 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 name was ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... side of everything," she wrote once, "so I'm on the side of the modern novel. I champion Mr. Howells. Are you reading his story in the Century? I like it because it isn't like anybody else; and Mr. Cable, too, you should read, and Henry James and Miss Jewett; they're all of this modern school, that most Western people know nothing about. The West is so afraid of its own judgments. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... 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, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... observation or dissecting motives psychologically. This amounted to a substitution of the French art of fiction, in some of its forms, for the English tradition of broad ideality and historical picturesqueness. The protagonist of the reform was William Dean Howells (born 1837), a cultivated literary scholar, and a various writer of essays, travel sketches, poetry and plays, editor of many magazines and books, whose career in letters has been more laborious and miscellaneous than any other contemporary, but whose main work has been the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... 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 to inspire a ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... Howells and other critics have censured Thackeray severely because of his tendency to preach, and also because he regarded his characters as puppets and himself as the showman who brought out their peculiarities. There ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Jerry, The son of Joseph and Sereno Howells, Seven days he wrestled with the dysentery And then he perished in ...
— Quaint Epitaphs • Various
... Cambridge school, for the first time in my life, I enjoyed the companionship of seeing and hearing girls of my own age. I lived with several others in one of the pleasant houses connected with the school, the house where Mr. Howells used to live, and we all had the advantage of home life. I joined them in many of their games, even blind man's buff and frolics in the snow; I took long walks with them; we discussed our studies and ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... 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. The latter was of English parentage, her birthplace being Bristol, but the land ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... the author of 'Clarissa Harlowe'? by the author of 'Tom Jones'? by the author of 'Tristram Shandy'? How would it have fared in the nineteenth century if Dickens had been attracted to it, or Thackeray? How would it be presented now in the twentieth century if it should be chosen again by Mr. Howells or by Mr. James? We need not ask what Mark Twain would do with it, because he has shown us in the Shepardson-Grangerford episode of 'Huckleberry Finn' that he could bring out its inherent romance, even tho he intrusted the telling to the humorous ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... not 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 absurd a book which is otherwise very attractive. ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... anyone born on 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 of things with which ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... is against "technic" in this sense of the term that the hero of Mr. Howells's admirable novel, The Story of a Play, protests in vigorous and memorable terms. "They talk," says Maxwell, "about a knowledge of the stage as if it were a difficult science, instead of a very simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities anyone may see at a glance. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... historical romance had already set in, that reached its climax with the death of the 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
... William Dean Howells Edgar Allan Poe Walt Whitman Henry James Harold Frederic Kate Chopin Stephen Crane Frank Norris When I Knew Stephen Crane On ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... on the New York of the sixties will be found an allusion to the Flora McFlimseys. For example, Mr. W.D. Howells, in "Literary Friends and Acquaintances," told of his first visit to the city at the time of the Civil War. After Clinton Place was passed, he wrote: "Commerce was just beginning to show itself ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... 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 for the higher civilization, which to be widely felt, needs ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... was a booby-hutch, a clumsy, ill-contrived covered carriage. The word is still used in some parts of England, and a curious survival of it in New England is the word booby-hut applied to a hooded sleigh; and booby to the body of a hackney coach set on runners. Mr. Howells uses the word booby in the latter signification, and it may be heard frequently in ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... 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 there, Bridges. Come ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar
... 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 ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... certainly be in the habit of rouging: three earls, seven lords, three bishops, two generals (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 Harte, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. |
