Howells

Oh, W. D. Howells. If only you were right.

/ Donna Campbell / Leave a comment

Reasons to support the humanities, number eleventy-trillion:

“You have often said that the novel is a perspective,” observed the other man. [Note: Stephen Crane, who was interviewing Howells.]

“A perspective–certainly.  It is a perspective made for the benefit of people who have no true use of their eyes.  The novel, in its real meaning, adjusts the proportions. It preserves the balances.  It is in this way that lessons are to be taught and reforms to be won.  When people are introduced to each other, they will see the resemblances, and won’t want to fight so badly.”

from “Howells Fears Realists Must Wait”

More articles at Research Exchange: W. D. Howells, Stephen Crane

/ Donna Campbell / Leave a comment

 

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Three more of my essays are available at the WSU Research Exchange at https://research.wsulibs.wsu.edu/xmlui/handle/2376/5613, below.

Ideally, MLA Commons would be able to accept links to institutional repositories, and–hooray!–they’re working on it (see above).

Recent Submissions

  • Reflections on Stephen Crane

    Campbell, Donna (Stephen Crane Studies, 2006)
    Like a lot of people, I was first introduced to Crane in a high school English class, but since the book was The Red Badge of Courage, and hence about war, I paid little attention. I did not care about war or about Henry …

  • W. D. Howells’s Unpublished Letters to J. Harvey Greene

    Campbell, Donna (Resources for American Literary Study, 2011)
    The relationship between W. D. Howells (1H37-1920) and his boyhood friend .James Harvey (or Hervey) Greene (1833-90) is treated only briefly in biographies of Howells, an understandable situation given the extensive network …

  • More than a Family Resemblance? Agnes Crane’s “A Victorious Defeat” and Stephen Crane’s The Third Violet

    Campbell, Donna (Stephen Crane Studies, 2007)
    Like his younger contemporary Jack London, who famously claimed to have had “no mentor but myself,” Stephen Crane acknowledged few influences on his writing. Established authors such as W. D. Howells and contemporaries …

Howells in the News: W. D. Howells, Steampunk Spymaster at Wired

/ Donna Campbell / Leave a comment

Reposted from the Howells Society site: Howells in the News: W. D. Howells, Steampunk Spymaster at Wired

At Wired, Bruce Sterling reads Howells’s “American Literature in Exile.”  A sample:

*It’s good to read Howell because he’s so secure in his own world. He’s properly dressed in his own Manhattan tie-and-tails; he’s not bitterly agitated, or preyed upon by bipolarity, like Clemens was. Howells is energetic without ever being antic. He gives the impression of a natural ruling-class figure who would likely do very well in the State Department.

*There’s a steampunk version of the Howells-Twain relationship where Howells is “M,” the master spy, the firm-hand-on-the-tiller, while Mark Twain is his brilliant yet reckless field agent, with a license to wander the world and kill off steampunk super-villains. I shouldn’t have said that, because now somebody’s gonna do it and get it all wrong; but, well, I’m in literary mode now, writing an Italian dieselpunk story, and the flights of fancy are proliferating out of control.

Biography Corner: John Hay’s Literary Network

/ Donna Campbell / 2 Comments

John_Hay,_bw_photo_portrait,_1897I’m only up to the year 1895 in listening to John Taliaferro’s All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, but it’s clear that what others are seeing as a bug in the biography is something I’d call a feature: its focus on the literary rather than the political side of Hay’s life.  Historians like Louis L. Gould in the Wall Street Journal and Heather Cox Richardson in the Washington Post have faulted Taliaferro’s lack of emphasis on politics, but for the literary historian, it offers a passing parade of nineteenth-century characters:

  • The Five of Hearts, including Henry Adams, the tragic Clover Adams, subject of a fine recent biography by Natalie Dykstra; and the mercurial Clarence King, whose amazing double life is told in Martha Sandweiss’s fascinating social history and biography of King, Passing Strange. 
  • The usual suspects: Lincoln, for whom (as anyone knows after seeing Lincoln), Hay served as a private secretary with John Nicolay; Garfield, Grant, James G. Blaine, McKinley, Mark Hanna.
  • Our old friend W. D. Howells, with whom Hay shared a lively correspondence as both men seem to have done with everyone else in the nineteenth century.
  • The beautiful and elusive Lizzie Cameron, for whom Hay, Adams, and a good portion of nineteenth-century masculine Washington seem to have carried a considerable torch (was she the “It Girl” of the Gilded Age?). She deserves a biography of her own.
  • Directly or indirectly: Mark Twain,  Henry James, and Bret Harte.  The latter’s success inspired Hay to write two popular dialect poems, “Little Breeches” and “Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle.” 
  • And Constance Fenimore Woolson, the subject of Anne Boyd Rioux’s new biography project.  Hay was related to Woolson through Samuel Mather, and it was Hay who helped arrange and pay for her burial in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. To Henry Adams, he wrote (I’m paraphrasing): “We buried poor Constance Woolson today. She did much good in her life, and no harm, and she had no more happiness than a convict.”

Hay’s The Breadwinners, which I read many years ago, is discussed at some length, as is the LIncoln biography and Hay’s poetry.