Familiar Spanish Travels
Familiar Spanish Travels
William Dean Howells spent his boyhood dreaming of Spain through the pages of Don Quixote. Decades later, as one of American literature's most powerful critics and editors, he finally made the journey, and what he found was both more and less than he'd imagined. This 1913 travelogue records not just the churches, cathedrals, and landscapes of Spain, but something more intimate: the collision between the Spain of childhood fantasy and the living, breathing country that awaited him. Howells brings his formidable literary mind to every observation, offering opinions on Moorish architecture, meditations on the Moorish presence in Andalusia, and reflections sparked by the very act of seeking a paradise he'd first imagined as a boy. The result is travel writing that transcends tourism: it's a meditation on how we build countries in our minds, and what happens when we finally walk the streets we've dreamed of.
