My Literary Passions Criticism And Fiction

Excerpt from My Literary Passions, Criticism and Fiction The papers, as they appeared from month to month, were not the product of those unities of time and place which were the happy conditioning of My Literary Passions. They could not have been written in quite so many places as times, but they enjoyed a comparable variety of origin. Beginning in Boston, they were continued in a Boston suburb, on the shores of Lake George, in a Western New York health resort, in Buffalo, in Nahant; once, twice, and thrice in New York, with reversions to Boston, and summer excur sions to the hills and waters of New England, until it seemed that their author had at last said his say, and he voluntarily lapsed into silence with the applause Of friends and enemies alike. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The sort of autobiography of which 'My Literary Passions' is an example is always interesting. Mr. Howells is by no means the first to write upon the theme of "Books Which Have Influenced Me", but we do not just now think of anyone before him who has made it the subject of a whole volume. Mr. Howells has had many "literary passions"— fifty, or thereabouts, to reckon only from the chapter headings—and in not a few cases it is obvious that he has loved not wisely, but too well. What we particularly like about the book, aside from the unfailing charm of its manner, is the frankly subjective character of the record. Mr. Howells has elsewhere sinned not a little in attempting to pass off his personal likes and dislikes as objective criticism, but in the present case what he writes is just what it pretends to be — a consecutive account of the books that came into his hands during his impressionable early years, and of the feelings with which he read them. There is an occasional touch of Philistinism, as in the plea more than once made for bowdlerizing the English classics in general, or of a lack of appreciation which is simply amazing, as in this opinion: "I do not think I should have lost much if I had never read 'Pericles' and 'Winter's Tale.' " In the present work Mr. Howells is concerned with the books that he read, and not with those that he wrote, but he does have a word to say of his own first volume, and it is to this amusing effect: "The 'Poems of Two Friends' became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame; the West waited, as it always does, to hear what the East should say; the East said nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred came back upon the publisher's hands."

My Literary Passions by William Dean Howells The papers collected here under the name of 'My Literary Passions' were printed serially in a periodical of such vast circulation that they might well have been supposed to have found there all the acceptance that could be reasonably hoped for them. Nevertheless, they were reissued in a volume the year after they first appeared, in 1895, and they had a pleasing share of such favor as their author's books have enjoyed. But it is to be doubted whether any one liked reading them so much as he liked writing them-say, some time in the years 1893 and 1894, in a New York flat, where he could look from his lofty windows over two miles and a half of woodland in Central Park, and halloo his fancy wherever he chose in that faery realm of books which he re-entered in reminiscences perhaps too fond at times, and perhaps always too eager for the reader's following. The name was thought by the friendly editor of the popular publication where they were serialized a main part of such inspiration as they might be conjectured to have, and was, as seldom happens with editor and author, cordially agreed upon before they were begun. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

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