A Hazard of New Fortunes — Volume 2
William Dean Howells's masterpiece of Gilded Age America follows the March family as they abandon their Boston roots for the commercial gamble of New York City. Basil March, a man of liberal conscience and modest means, takes a publishing job in the metropolis, dragging his wife Isabel into a world where money talks and old certainties dissolve. The novel dramatizes the collision between a self-made millionaire and a fiery social revolutionary, with Basil caught in the middle, desperately seeking fair ground that doesn't exist. Around them swirls the bohemian world of aspiring artists, the grinding poverty of the working class, and the brutal economics of a city that rewards ruthlessness. Howells renders fin-de-siècle New York with journalistic precision while tracing the slow erosion of progressive ideals when they meet hard reality. This is the American Dream disassembled: not a story of success or failure, but of the compromises and illusions that sustain it.
