A Boy's Town

For a literary moment, set aside the cynicism of adulthood and enter the world as a boy sees it. William Dean Howells, the master of American realism, turns his keen eye on something rarer than social commentary: the inner life of a child. In A Boy's Town, he reconstructs the America of the 1840s through the eyes of a boy between the ages of three and eleven, capturing not merely what happened, but how it felt to live inside those small moments. The rivers and canals of the town are grander than any cathedral. School is a kingdom of its own. Family is everything and nothing, depending on the hour. Howells understood something most novelists miss: children inhabit a complete world, not a rough draft of adulthood. This is nostalgia with teeth, tender but never saccharine, remembering the genuine strangeness of growing up.