Oliver Wendell Holmes (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
1896
Oliver Wendell Holmes (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
1896
William Dean Howells was ideally positioned to write the portrait of Oliver Wendell Holmes: he had sat at the great man's breakfast table, witnessed the wit that made Boston gasp, and moved through the same rarified world of Brahmin poets and Harvard physicians. This biographical essay captures Holmes in his full contradiction: a doctor who saved lives by day and wrote verses that saved nothing but the afternoon, a man whose famous humor masked a deeper tenderness. Howells traces Holmes's journey from the young medical student whose poem 'Old Ironsides' roused a nation, to the beloved 'Autocrat' whose essays made him the voice of Victorian Boston's parlor culture. The book is less a formal biography than an intimate act of remembrance, suffused with the particular sadness of a survivor looking back at a vanished world. For readers who crave the texture of literary America's golden age, this is Holmes preserved in amber, still sharp, still laughing, still very much alive.
