Studies of Lowell (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
Studies of Lowell (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
In the autumn of 1860, a young writer from Ohio arrived in Cambridge on what he called a literary pilgrimage, seeking out the celebrated poet and critic James Russell Lowell. What began as reverent admiration evolved into decades of intimate friendship, and this memoir is William Dean Howells's tender attempt to capture the man he loved. Written after Lowell's death, the book refuses the distance of official biography; instead, Howells paints Lowell as he knew him: over dinner tables, in walking conversations, in moments of literary struggle and personal doubt. He gives us Lowell the abolitionist who grappled with democracy's contradictions after the Civil War, the poet who wrestled with his own public persona, the friend who offered warmth and intellectual companionship to a fellow writer finding his way in American letters. Howells includes himself in the portrait without apology, knowing that no true likeness exists apart from the gazer's eye. The result is less a critical assessment than an elegy, a literary friend's testimony to what it meant to know James Russell Lowell when American literature was still becoming itself.
