Henry Carter Hull

A Modern Instance is a realistic novel written by William Dean Howells, and published in 1882 by J. R. Osgood & Co. The novel is about the deterioration of a once loving marriage under the influence of capitalistic greed. It is the first American novel by a canonical author to seriously consider divorce as a realistic outcome of marriage. The novel explores the deterioration of a marriage doomed from the outset by the imbalance between the emotional...

Published in two volumes, Howells's studies in the great heroines of nineteenth century English-language fiction make delightful reading. This first volume takes the reader from Fanny Burney's unforgettable Evelina to the Bronte sisters' remarkable Jane and Catherine. Along the way, female protagonists from the works of Edgeworth, Austen, Radcliffe, Scott, Dickens, Hawthorne, and Thackeray, among others, are closely and keenly observed.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Howells was appointed United States consul in Venice, Italy. In Venetian Life, an utterly engaging travelogue, Howells revises a series of travel letters he had written about his experiences in Venice for the Boston Advertiser. Honest in its love for (yet discomfort in) Venice, it would be followed by Italian Journeys.

Published in 1910, this book is a testament to the long friendship between Howells and Twain. "Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists," Howells writes, "they were like one another and like other literary men, but Clemens [Twain] was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature." The second half of the book collects Howells's perceptive reviews of Twain's works.

The first Ohio stories are part of the common story of the wonderful Ice Age, when a frozen deluge pushed down from the north, and covered a vast part of the earth's surface with slowly moving glaciers. The traces that this age left in Ohio are much the same as it left elsewhere, and the signs that there were people here ten thousand years ago, when the glaciers began to melt and the land became fit to live in again, are such as have been found in...