A Hazard of New Fortunes — Complete
1890
In 1890, William Dean Howells turned his gaze from Boston to the roaring, ruthless heart of New York City and found America's defining conflict: the chasm between those who have and those who have not, with the middle ground crumbling beneath them. Basil March, a middle-aged insurance man, abandons his comfortable life in Boston when Fulkerson, a magnetic entrepreneur, offers him the editorship of a revolutionary new magazine built on a cooperative model for writers. But the promise of artistic fulfillment curdles when Basil becomes entangled in the battle between Dryfoos, a vulgar newly-rich millionaire, and his son's radical friend Lindau, a social revolutionary who sees the wealthy as parasites. Basil's earnest attempts to find common ground collapse into a crisis of conscience that forces him to choose sides in a class war he naively believed could be mediated. Howells renders fin de siècle Manhattan with savage precision: its glittering towers, its squalid tenements, its breathless pace of change. This is a novel that understands how easily good intentions dissolve when money and ideology collide.
