W. D. Howells in the News
Thursday, March 18, 2004
A LITERARY marker honoring Martins Ferry native authors William Dean Howells and James Wright will be dedicated April 17 during the 24th annual James Wright Poetry Festival in Martins Ferry.
Monday, March 15, 2004
More on Cohen's book from the San Jose Mercury News :
There is much unabashed fictionalizing in this book. We are told that the artist Beauford Delaney, on his way to meet W.C. Handy, ``paused for a minute to admire the reflections in the windows of the store at the corner of Thompson and Bleecker -- the plate glass doubled the fruit for sale and the fire hydrant -- and then he went on.'' And we are shown William Dean Howells, ``pacing the rug in his library'' and reflecting on a conversation with James: ``Though it was winter and they had meant just to take a turn through the Cambridge streets, they had found themselves walking, as they often did, out as far as Fresh Pond.''
But in the source notes at the end of the book, Cohen admits that she doesn't know whether Howells and James walked as far as Fresh Pond on that occasion, that ``Delaney's walk through Washington Square is a route he often took,'' and that she has added ``details of atmosphere'' to some encounters, fiddled with chronology and otherwise speculated about particulars.
Sunday, March 14, 2004
From a Times-Picayune review of Cohen's book:
In one memorable passage, William Dean Howells paces in his library, comparing himself to Henry James. "Sometimes it took a full hour of pacing to finish in one's head a conversation begun earlier in the evening with Henry James."
"Howells and James were prodigiously productive. Howells wrote so much that sometimes his right thumb was welled up and his right wrist gave out altogether. Each wrote a book a year for almost forty years, and each read all the other's work. They wrote as they talked, the way ordinary people walked: fluently, unerringly, reliably, with their own gaits, confidently, over their own terrain. And they wrote next to each other, into and out of each other's lives, as if they still walked, every few weeks, out around the perimeter of Fresh Pond."
