Possibly the most influential figure in the history of American letters, William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was, among other things, a leading novelist in the realist tradition, a formative influence on many of America's finest writers, and an outspoken opponent of social injustice. This biography, the first comprehensive work on Howells in fifty years, enters the consciousness of the man and his times, revealing a complicated and painfully honest figure who came of age in an era of political corruption, industrial greed, and American imperialism. Written with verve and originality in a highly absorbing style, it brings alive for a new generation a literary and cultural pioneer who played a key role in creating the American artistic ethos. William Dean Howells traces the writer's life from his boyhood in Ohio before the Civil War, to his consularship in Italy under President Lincoln, to his rise as editor of Atlantic Monthly. It looks at his writing, which included novels, poems, plays, children's books, and criticism. Howells had many powerful friendships among the literati of his day; and here we find an especially rich examination of the relationship between Howells and Mark Twain. Howells was, as Twain called him, "the boss" of literary critics―his support almost single-handedly made the careers of many writers, including African Americans like Paul Dunbar and women like Sarah Orne Jewett. Showcasing many noteworthy personalities―Henry James, Edmund Gosse, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and many others―William Dean Howells portrays a man who stood at the center of American literature through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Goodman, Susan

Dawson, Carl

Arts & Literature

University of California Press

Mary Austin (1868-1934)―eccentric, independent, and unstoppable―was twenty years old when her mother moved the family west. Austin's first look at her new home, glimpsed from California's Tejon Pass, reset the course of her life, “changed her horizons and marked the beginning of her understanding, not only about who she was, but where she needed to be.” At a time when Frederick Jackson Turner had announced the closing of the frontier, Mary Austin became the voice of the American West. In 1903, she published her first book, The Land of Little Rain, a wholly original look at the West's desert and its ethnically diverse peoples. Defined in a sense by the places she lived, Austin also defined the places themselves, whether Bishop, in the Sierra Nevada, Carmel, with its itinerant community of western writers, or Santa Fe, where she lived the last ten years of her life. By the time of her death in 1934, Austin had published over thirty books and counted as friends the leading literary and artistic lights of her day. In this rich new biography, Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson explore Austin's life and achievement with unprecedented resonance, depth, and understanding. By focusing on one extraordinary woman's life, Mary Austin and the American West tells the larger story of the emerging importance of California and the Southwest to the American consciousness.

Mary Austin and the American West

Community & Culture

Matthew Arnold, the poetry: the critical heritage, (The Critical heritage series)

Literature & Fiction

Routledge and Kegan Paul

A ten-year-old boy and his family leave the hardships of post-World War II Yorkshire to move to Los Angeles, in an account based on the author's own experiences

November 1948

Literary

Univ of Virginia Pr

Living Backwards: A Transatlantic Memoir incorporates November 1948 into a longer work that takes the ten-year-old author from a small gray Yorkshire village to the bright postwar boom of Los Angeles and back again at fourteen to the sober mill region of his ancestors.
Through it all Living Backwards captures in moving detail a schoolboy's feeling of being neither of one place nor the other. As his father loses his battle with Alzheimer's disease, the middle-aged narrator becomes his father's memory, recalling for him his Yorkshire past, tying together the book's themes of memory and loss, identity and place.

Living Backwards: A Transatlantic Memoir

Originally published in 1979. Carl Dawson looks at the year 1850, which was an extraordinary year in English literary history, to study both the great and forgotten writers, to survey journals and novels, poems and magazines, and to ask questions about dominant influences and ideas. His primary aim is descriptive: How was Wordsworth's Prelude received by his contemporaries on its publication in 1850? How did reviewers respond to new tendencies in poetry and fiction/ Who were the prominent literary models? But Dawson's descriptions also lead to broader, theoretical questions about such issues as the status of the imagination in an age obsessed by mechanical invention, about the public role of the writer, the appeal to nature, and the use of myth and memory. To express the Victorians' estimation of poetry, for example, Dawson presents the contrasting views help by two eminent Victorians, Macaulay and Carlyle. In Macaulay's opinion, the advance of civilization led to the decline of poetry; Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the poet as a spiritual liberator in a world of materialists. The fusion of the poet's personal and public roles is witnessed in a discussion of the two mid-Victorian Poet Laureates, Wordsworth and his successor, Tennyson. In analyzing the relationship between the two writers' works, Dawson also highlights the extent of the Victorians' admiration for Dante. To give a wider perspective of the status of literature during this time, Dawson examines reviews, prefaces, and other remarks. Critics, he shows, made a clear distinction between poetry and fiction. Thus, in 1850, a comparison between, say, Wordsworth and Dickens would not have been made. Dawson, however, does compare the two, by focusing on their uses of autobiography. Dickens surfaces again, in a discussion of Victorian periodical publishing. Here, Dawson compares the Pre-Raphaelites' short-lived journal The Germ with Dickens' enormously popular Household Words and a radical paper, The Red Republican, which printed the first English version of "The Communist Manifesto" in 1850. In bringing together materials that have often been seen as disparate and unrelated and by suggesting new literary and ideological relationships, Carl Dawson has written a book to inform almost any reader, whether scholar of Victorian literature or lover of Dicken's novels.

Victorian Noon: English Literature in 1850

History & Criticism

Johns Hopkins University Press

Trade between the European Union and North Africa has been a contentious issue since the Treaty of Rome. Serious diplomatic attempts to broker a resolution resulted in the Association Agreement between Morocco and the EU in 1995, after protracted negotiations over three years. Here Dawson analyses the process by which a sub-optimal agreement was ratified - unfavourable to Morocco, some member states of the EU and also wider EU economic objectives for North Africa. He draws on a rich vein of testimony from key players to show how democracy deficits in Morocco and excessive pressure group influence in the EU led to skewed negotiations. An insightful analysis of the trade negotiation process, EU Integration with North Africa elucidates the underpinnings of the global economic order; it will be valuable for those concerned with international relations, globalisation and the EU, especially North Africa.

EU Integration with North Africa: Trade Negotiations and Democracy Deficits in Morocco (Library of European Studies)

Business & Money

Economics

I.B.Tauris

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Books by Dawson, Carl