Ohio History Journal

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

 

Howells and the Age of Realism. By Everett Carter. (Philadelphia and New

York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1954. 307p.; index. $5.00.)

Mr. Carter's scholarly study of William Dean Howells and his fellow

realists is a sound, valuable chapter in our literary and social history. It

is not a definitive biography such as Leon Edel's Henry James or Dixon

Wecter's Sam Clemens of Hannibal, but an intellectual portrait of Howells,

drawn by careful analysis and interpretation. Mr. Carter sympathetically

traces the evolution of Howells' aesthetic and ethical ideas, shows their

embodiment in his fiction and criticism, and relates Howells to "realists"

of every stripe--J. W. De Forest, Bret Harte, Edward Eggleston, Mark

Twain, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Harold Frederic, Henry Blake Fuller,

Frank Norris, Robert Herrick, James Gould Cozzens, and others. Howells'

thinking and writing are worth this close attention because they were rep-

resentative and influential in the post-Civil War decades which were the

beginning of modern America, and to this extent they are part of our

make-up today.

Mr. Carter has divided his material into forty short essays--historical,

analytical, or interpretive--each discussing a different part of Howells'

ideas, work, and milieu. Some of the best of these are "Taine in America,"

"Dramatic Method and Organic Form," "Impressionism and Realism,"

"Pragmatism and Realism," and "Morality and Realism." Occasionally such

chopping-up of the subject seems arbitrary or artificial. Sometimes the forty

essays overlap and repeat one another, and they are of uneven quality. But

if a few are dull, obvious, or unhappily academic, others are sensitive and

illuminating. Most of them are thorough, original studies of fictional form

and method, and all of them are clear and explicit.

In tracing the successive stages in Howells' realism, Mr. Carter begins

by reconstructing his literary inheritance of eighteenth-century rationality

and empiricism, then takes up the anti-sentimental movement, in which he

early enrolled himself. When the young Ohioan became assistant editor of

the august Atlantic Monthly in 1866, his common-sense reviews regularly

debunked the false and sentimental mishmash of popular literature, and such

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