William Dean Howells's warm, intimate portrait of Mark Twain begins with their first meeting in Boston and grows into a lifelong friendship marked by laughter, admiration, and repeated visits in Hartford and New York. Twain emerges as a dazzling presence: theatrically dressed, mischievous, endlessly talkative, and yet rooted in a boyish originality that made his humor feel inseparable from deeper wisdom. Howells moves through literary gatherings with Fields, Aldrich, Bret Harte, and Ralph ...

A middle-aged American in Florence, comfortable and finished with life, is courted by a girl of twenty and by her chaperone, who is his own age — and behaves badly, then better, then badly again. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary broker in America; this 1886 novel is his lightest and his best, and the humiliation of a man discovering he is not young is done with no cruelty at all.

An Ohio family — a judge, his wife, and a daughter recovering from an unsuitable attachment — is taken to Europe to get over it, and the Atlantic and the Dutch canals do not much help. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary broker in America; this 1902 novel is his quiet study of ordinary decent people being wrong about their own children, and the father is beautifully done.

The Marches, married twenty-five years, take the European tour they could not afford as newlyweds — the ship, the Rhine, Carlsbad, a young couple in trouble whom they cannot help minding about. Howells edited The Atlantic and wrote for Harper's, and was the most powerful literary broker in America; here he does middle age exactly, and the kindness of the book is not softness.

If you were looking for the definitive Christmas anthology, consider yourself lucky, because you just found it! This book is everything you want Christmas to be — loving, warm and celebratory. Timeless and adorable, beautifully designed, "The Big Book of Christmas" is a great big stocky book — stuffed with novels, novellas, short stories, poems, carols and songs. Inside you'll find: · Novels, novellas and short stories from Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Hans Christian Andersen, O. He...

A self-made paint millionaire from Vermont builds a house on the water side of Beacon Street and discovers that Boston's old families will accept his money and not his daughters. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary man in America; he made his hero's crisis a matter of business ethics rather than romance, which nobody had thought to do.

A Vermont girl of no family is taken up by a rich woman as a companion and carried to Italy — where the arrangement, and everyone's exact idea of what she is owed, comes apart. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary broker in America; this 1899 novel is his quietest anatomy of patronage, and the girl's refusal to be grateful on cue is the whole book.

Deans History of the Ottoman Empire is a fascinating chronicle of Ottoman Empire from the 13th to the mid 19th centuries.

Bartley Hubbard, a sharp-eyed Boston journalist, arrives to profile Silas Lapham for a series on "solid men," and the interview quickly becomes a vivid portrait of American self-making. Lapham, prosperous, plainspoken, and proud, recounts his Vermont boyhood, his mother's exhausting labor, and the hard-won path that took him from sawmills and stage driving to a hotel, a marriage to the schoolteacher Persis, and finally a business fortune. At the center of his rise is the accidental discove...

Silas Lapham's long-lasting paint, made with minerals found on his family's farm in Vermont, has helped make him a millionaire-as has hard work, ambition, and tough business sense. Now that he's reached late middle age, he's a success. A newspaper is writing him up in its "Solid Men of Boston" series, his family goes to seaside resorts in the summer, the scion of the aristocratic Covey family has joined his firm, his daughters have made inroads into 1880s society, and he's even having a la...

In "Staccato Notes of a Vanished Summer," Howells explores themes related to memory and the passage of time. The story is a reflection on the past and the fleeting nature of memories. It portrays the narrator's recollection of a summer romance and the vivid but fading memories associated with it.The title "Staccato Notes of a Vanished Summer" suggests that the story is filled with short, disconnected, and somewhat disjointed memories, much like staccato musical notes. Howells uses his narr...

"The Quality of Mercy" explores the lives of a group of characters living in a small New England town and the moral dilemmas they face in their daily lives. Set against the backdrop of late 19th-century America, the novel delves into themes of compassion, forgiveness, and the nature of justice.The plot follows the intertwined fates of several characters, including a wealthy businessman, a young artist, and a struggling immigrant family. As their lives intersect and their destinies become e...