Literary Boston as I Knew It (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
Literary Boston as I Knew It (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
William Dean Howells arrived in Boston in the 1860s as a young man from Ohio, and stumbling into the inner circle of American letters, he found himself sitting in Ralph Waldo Emerson's parlor, arguing poetry with James Russell Lowell, and watching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow grow old. This memoir captures something no history book can: the texture of daily life among the men who invented American literature. Howells writes with affection and clear-eyed nostalgia about a world where writers mattered, where the Atlantic Monthly was the center of the cultural universe, and where a young Midwesterner could rise to become the most powerful literary editor in America. He gives us Emerson the sage, Lowell the wit, Longfellow the beloved professor, and Whittier the Quaker poet not as monuments but as human beings who drank too much, told jokes, and worried about their reputations. For anyone who has ever wondered what it felt like to be present at the creation of American literature, this book is an intimate front-row seat.
