The Sleeping-Car: A Farce
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in American literature and nineteenth-century stage comedy
- Literature enthusiasts who want to see Howells's lighter side
- Learners who need a short English play for reading practice
- General readers who enjoy mistaken-identity comedy in a confined setting
Not a good fit for
- Readers expecting deep social criticism or complex plots
- Readers who prefer full-length novels
- Beginning readers unfamiliar with play format and stage directions
Reading tips
- Read through once to grasp the jokes and relationships, then go back to details in the stage directions.
- Try reading aloud in roles to feel the rhythm of farcical dialogue.
- Before reading, learn a little about the layout of nineteenth-century American sleeping cars to help understand the staging.
- After finishing, compare it with Howells's realistic novels to see how his humour differs.
About the publisher
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
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
FAQ
Is this a complete play?
Isn't Howells a realistic novelist?
Do I need theatre expertise to read it?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the 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.
