Cambridge Neighbors (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
Cambridge Neighbors (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
In this intimate late-century memoir, William Dean Howells offers a warm, unhurried portrait of literary Cambridge at its apex. These are not formal biographies but affectionate memories of friends: the scholar Francis J. Child, whose legendary command of ballads left Howells awestruck, and the Norwegian-born poet Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, among others. Howells writes with the ease of someone recalling evenings spent talking literature, moments of intellectual camaraderie, and the small kindnesses that bound a literary community together. There is no effort to dazzle, only the quiet pleasure of remembering people who mattered. For readers drawn to the private lives behind public letters, this memoir opens a door into a world where Emerson might stroll past your window and Mark Twain might stop by for dinner. It is a tribute to friendship as lived experience, and a meditation on how deeply writers shape one another.
