A Hazard of New Fortunes — Volume 3
William Dean Howells constructed his masterwork of American realism in the tension between old money and new, between the immigrant's fortune and the idealist's conscience. Volume 3 finds Basil March, editor of the literary magazine 'Every Other Week,' caught between the self-made millionaire Mr. Dryfoos and the fiery social revolutionary who challenges everything Dryfoos represents. Fulkerson, the magazine's ambitious publisher, schemes to celebrate their success with a grand banquet of literary names, blind to the class resentments simmering beneath the celebration. As March attempts mediation, he discovers that neutrality itself becomes a moral compromise. Howells renders fin de siècle New York with exacting precision: the glittering salons, the cramped boarding houses, the brutal economics of reputation and reinvention. This is a novel where every character believes they are right, where no position is villainous, and where the reader finishes understanding every perspective without being certain which is correct. It remains the finest American novel about the impossible position of the thoughtful person caught in social upheaval.
