W. D. Howells in the News
Sunday, February 29, 2004
From a Newsday review of Rachel Cohen's A CHANCE MEETING: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 (Random House, 2004): "In Cohen's great chain of being, one brilliant creator is linked to another and another, so that American culture is seen as the vibrant organic whole it truly is. There really are but six degrees of separation between William Dean Howells and Willa Cather, she suggests, or between Langston Hughes and Norman Mailer."
Comment: Most Howellsians would say that there's an even closer link between WDH and Cather: Sarah Orne Jewett or Stephen Crane. --D. Campbell
Monday, February 09, 2004
From a book review of Fred Kaplan's The Singular Mark Twain in the Star-Telegram:
Here's how Kaplan puts it: "On the twenty-third, Shakespeare's birthday, huge crowds passed before the coffin in the Brick Church in Manhattan. Joe Twitchell said a broken-hearted prayer. The nation bordered itself in black for a moment of mourning, as if a well-liked president had died in office. Later, at a memorial, Howells [William Dean Howells] put into words Twain's 'congeries of contradictions -- but contradictions confessed, explicit, positive -- I wish we might show him frankly as he always showed himself. We may confess that he had faults, while we deny that he tried to make them pass for merits. He disowned his errors by owning them; in the very defects of his qualities he triumphed, and he could make us glad with him at his escape from them.'"
Kaplan points out that Howells later wrote "a short, beautiful book, My Mark Twain," in which he reminisced about great writers he had known. Kaplan quotes Howells from that book: "They were all like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."
It is noteworthy that Howells refers to Twain as Clemens in that statement. Kaplan's inclusion of that quote underscores Kaplan's thesis that Samuel Langhorne Clemens remained the same person, even after he began using the pen name Mark Twain.
