Dean Howells / Classics Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells (Illustrated)

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-910630-75-4
Verlag: Delphi Classics
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 3245 Seiten

Reihe: Series Five

William Dean Howells, the realist master known as 'The Dean of American Letters', produced an enormous oeuvre of works that had a lasting influence on American literature. For the first time in publishing history, this comprehensive eBook presents Howells' complete works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts appearing in digital print for the first time, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 2)

* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Howells' life and works
* Concise introductions to the novels and other texts
* All 42 novels, with individual contents tables
* Many rare novels available in no other collection
* Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the texts
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry and the short stories
* Easily locate the poems or short stories you want to read
* Includes Howells' complete travel writing, with many rare texts appearing here for the first time in digital print
* Many rare essays and non-fiction works
* Features two autobiographies - discover Howells' literary life
* Ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres
* UPDATED with revised texts, a posthumous novel, a rare non-fiction text and two biographies

CONTENTS:

The Novels
Their Wedding Journey (1872)
A Chance Acquaintance (1873)
A Foregone Conclusion (1875)
The Lady of the Aroostook (1879)
The Undiscovered Country (1880)
A Fearful Responsibility (1881)
Dr. Breen's Practice (1881)
A Modern Instance (1882)
A Woman's Reason (1883)
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
Indian Summer (1886)
The Minister's Charge (1886)
April Hopes (1888)
Annie Kilburn (1889)
A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)
The Shadow of a Dream (1890)
A Boy's Town (1890)
The Quality of Mercy (1891)
An Imperative Duty (1892)
The World of Chance (1893)
The Coast of Bohemia (1893)
A Traveler from Altruria (1894)
The Day of Their Wedding (1895)
The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897)
The Story of a Play (1898)
Ragged Lady (1899)
Their Silver Wedding Anniversary (1899)
The Flight of Pony Baker (1902)
The Kentons (1902)
Letters Home (1903)
Letters of an Altrurian Traveller (1904)
The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904)
Miss Bellard's Inspiration (1905)
Through the Eye of the Needle (1907)
The Whole Family (1908)
Fennel and Rue (1908)
New Leaf Mills (1913)
The Leatherwood God (1916)
The Vacation of the Kelwyns (1920)
Mrs. Farrell (1921)

The Shorter Fiction
Suburban Sketches (1871)
Christmas Every Day (1892)
Stories of Ohio (1897)
A Pair of Patient Lovers and Other Stories (1901)
Literature and Life (1902)
Questionable Shapes (1903)
Editha (1905)
Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907)
Seen and Unseen at Stratford-Upon-Avon (1914)
The Daughter of the Storage and Other Things in Prose and Verse (1916)
Boy Life Stories and Readings Selected from the Works of William Dean Howells (1919)
Miscellaneous Stories

The Farces

The Poetry Collections
Poems (1886)
Stops of Various Quills (1895)

The Poems
List of Poems in Chronological Order
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

The Travel Writing
The Non-Fiction
The Autobiographies
My Year in a Log Cabin (1893)
Years of My Youth (1916)

The Biographies
William Dean Howells (1889) by Charles Dudley Warner
William Dean Howells (1921) by Carl Van Doren

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dean Howells, William

Classics, Delphi

Leseproben

II. MIDSUMMER-DAY’S DREAM.

THEY HAD WAITED to see Leonard, in order that they might learn better how to find his house in the country; and now, when they came in upon him at nine o’clock, he welcomed them with all his friendly heart. He rose from the pile of morning’s letters to which he had but just sat down; he placed them the easiest chairs; he made a feint of its not being a busy hour with him, and would have had them look upon his office, which was still damp and odorous from the porter’s broom, as a kind of down-town parlor; but after they had briefly accounted to his amazement for their appearance then and there, and Isabel had boasted of the original fashion in which they had that morning seen New York, they took pity on him, and bade him adieu till evening.

They crossed from Broadway to the noisome street by the ferry, and in a little while had taken their places in the train on the other side of the water.

“Don’t tell me, Basil,” said Isabel, “that Leonard travels fifty miles every day by rail going to and from his work!”

“I must, dearest, if I would be truthful.”

“Then, darling, there are worse things in this world than living up at the South End, aren’t there?” And in agreement upon Boston as a place of the greatest natural advantages, as well as all acquirable merits, with after talk that need not be recorded, they arrived in the best humor at the little country station near which the Leonards dwelt.

I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, though I do it at the cost of the reader, who suspects the excitements which a long description of the movement would delay. The ladies were very old friends, and they had not met since Isabel’s return from Europe and renewal of her engagement. Upon the news of this, Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprising ease all that she had said in blame of Basil’s conduct during the rupture, and exacted a promise from her friend that she should pay her the first visit after their marriage. And now that they had come together, their only talk was of husbands, whom they viewed in every light to which husbands could be turned, and still found an inexhaustible novelty in the theme. Mrs. Leonard beheld in her friend’s joy the sweet reflection of her own honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of the former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit and comfort, they reassured one another by every question and answer, and in their weak content lapsed far behind the representative women of our age, when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and the relation of wives to them is known to be one of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty, fogies put their heads of false hair together, they were as silly and benighted as their great-grandmothers could have been in the same circumstances, and, as I say, shamefully encouraged each other, in their absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true. “Do you really suppose, Basil,” Isabel would say to her oppressor, after having given him some elegant extract from the last conversation upon husbands, “that we shall get on as smoothly as the Leonards when we have been married ten years? Lucy says that things go more hitchily the first year than ever they do afterwards, and that people love each other better and better just because they’ve got used to it. Well, our bliss does seem a little crude and garish compared with their happiness; and yet” — she put up both her palms against his, and gave a vehement little push— “there is something agreeable about it, even at this stage of the proceedings.”

“Isabel,” said her husband, with severity, “this is bridal!”

“No matter! I only want to seem an old married woman to the general public. But the application of it is that you must be careful not to contradict me, or cross me in anything, so that we can be like the Leonards very much sooner than they became so. The great object is not to have any hitchiness; and you know you ARE provoking — at times.”

They both educated themselves for continued and tranquil happiness by the example and precept of their friends; and the time passed swiftly in the pleasant learning, and in the novelty of the life led by the Leonards. This indeed merits a closer study than can be given here, for it is the life led by vast numbers of prosperous New Yorkers who love both the excitement of the city and the repose of the country, and who aspire to unite the enjoyment of both in their daily existence. The suburbs of the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles in every direction; and everywhere are handsome villas like Leonard’s, inhabited by men like himself, whom strict study of the time-table enables to spend all their working hours in the city and all their smoking and sleeping hours in the country.

The home and the neighborhood of the Leonards put on their best looks for our bridal pair, and they were charmed. They all enjoyed the visit, said guests and hosts, they were all sorry to have it come to an end; yet they all resigned themselves to this conclusion. Practically, it had no other result than to detain the travellers into the very heart of the hot weather. In that weather it was easy to do anything that did not require an active effort, and resignation was so natural with the mercury at ninety, that I aan not sure but there was something sinful in it.

They had given up their cherished purpose of going to Albany by the day boat, which was represented to them in every impossible phase. It would be dreadfully crowded, and whenever it stopped the heat would be insupportable. Besides it would bring them to Albany at an hour when they must either spend the night there, or push on to Niagara by the night train. “You had better go by the evening boat. It will be light almost till you reach West Point, and you’ll see all the best scenery. Then you can get a good night’s rest, and start fresh in the morning.” So they were counseled, and they assented, as they would have done if they had been advised: “You had better go by the morning boat. It’s deliciously cool, travelling; you see the whole of the river, you reach Albany for supper, and you push through to Niagara that night and are done with it.”

They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of his wife at noon, and fifteen minutes later they were rushing from the heat of the country into the heat of the city, where some affairs and pleasures were to employ them till the evening boat should start.

Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell of the great heat brooded upon them. All abroad burned the fierce white light of the sun, in which not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst, but the very air withered, and was faint and thin to the troubled respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long journeys from broiling cities of the West, and who were dusty and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird; now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby from one arm to another; after every station the desperate conductor swung through the long aisle and punched the ticket, which each passenger seemed to yield him with a tacit malediction; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which could only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The wind buffeted faintly at the windows; when the door was opened, the clatter of the rails struck through and through the car like a demoniac yell.

Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they seemed to have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vigorous atmosphere, so close and dead and mined with the carbonic breath of the locomotives was the air of the place. The thin old wooden walls that shut out the glare of the sun transmitted an intensified warmth; the roof seemed to hover lower and lower, and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat deadlier than that poured upon it from the skies.

In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer, before which every passenger, on going aboard the ferry-boat, paused as at a shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the altar of this fetich our friends also paused, and saw that the mercury was above ninety, and exulting with the pride that savages take in the cruel might of their idols, bowed their souls to the great god Heat.

On the boat they found a place where the breath of the sea struck cool across their faces, and made them forget the thermometer for the brief time of the transit. But presently they drew near that strange, irregular row of wooden buildings and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New York aide, and before the boat’s motion ceased the air grew thick and warm again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the buildings front. Upon this the boat’s passengers issued, passing up through a gangway, on one side of which a throng of return-passengers was pent by a gate of iron barn, like a herd of wild animals. They were streaming with perspiration, and, according to their different temperaments, had faces of deep crimson or deadly pallor.

“Now the question is, my dear,” said Basil when, free of the press, they lingered for a moment in the shade outside, “whether we had better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these cars here, and be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion. By this route we shall have sights end smells which the other can’t offer us, but whichever we take we shall be sorry.”

“Then I say take...