My First Visit to New England, and Others (from Literary Friends and

Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
164K words
Chapters
17

Tags

English Originals Essays and Miscellany First ImpressionsTravel MemoirLiterary FriendshipImpressionistic Essays19th CenturyNew EnglandAmerican Letters

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.My First Visit to New England, and Others (from Literary Friends andAuthor: Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Oct 22, 2004

Editor's review

This is a section from Howells's Literary Friends and Acquaintance, recording his first visit to New England and the people he met there. Howells was a key promoter of nineteenth-century American literary realism and long edited The Atlantic Monthly, maintaining close ties with the literary world of his day. The book's value lies not in systematic argument but in the immediacy of an eyewitness account: he writes of travels, visits, and the everyday details of time spent with writers, offering first-hand material for understanding the cultural atmosphere of American literature's transition from romanticism to realism. The prose is plain and restrained, with the gentle tone characteristic of memoir; it suits readers new to nineteenth-century American literary circles and those interested in American cultural history who wish to dip in at leisure. Note that this is a public-domain ebook in the original English, not a translation; the barrier to reading lies in the language rather than the difficulty of the content.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the introduction or learn about Howells's life first, then the main text, to grasp the relationships more easily
  2. Read alongside background material on The Atlantic Monthly
  3. Read piece by piece, making brief notes on people after each
  4. Skip unfamiliar names and places at first, then look them up after finishing

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this book a Chinese translation? No. This is a public-domain English ebook released by Project Gutenberg; the original is in English with no Chinese translation, so some English ability is required.
How does the content relate to Literary Friends and Acquaintance? This book is a selection from that work, mainly containing the author's account of his first visit to New England and related reminiscences; it is not the complete book, so readers should note the scope of the pieces.
Can I read it without a background in literary history? Yes, but some background information will be lost. It is advisable to learn about the major nineteenth-century American writers and periodicals first, then read the text for smoother understanding.

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About the author

Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920 Author

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was an American author and literary editor, with 107 works held in the collection. His writing spans novels, travel books, memoirs, and literary essays, and his representative works include My Mark Twain, Indian Summer, A Boy's Town, A Modern Instance, and A Hazard of New Fortunes. Howells drew on close observation of everyday life, writing in a plain style with gentle irony and attending to moral questions and human situations amid social change; his travel book Venetian Life and his memoir Literary Friends and Acquaintance record his journeys and personal recollections of American literary figures. Public information is limited, so biographical details are not elaborated here; readers may turn to the works above to learn about his subjects and style.