William Dean Howells' richly humorous characterization of a self-made millionaire in Boston society provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age. After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston, where they awkwardly attempt to break into Brahmin society. Silas, greedy for wealth as well as prestige, brings his company to the brink of bankruptcy, and the family is forced to return to Vermont, financially ruined but morally renewed. As Kermit Vanderbilt points out in his introduction, the novel focuses on important themes in the American literary tradition: the efficacy of self-help and determination, the ambiguous benefits of social and economic progress, and the continual contradiction between urban and pastoral values. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Argues the renewed importance of Howells's novel for an understanding of literature as a social force as well as a literary form.

In Howells' maybe the most famous novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, the story follows the materialistic rise of Silas Lapham from rags to riches, and his ensuing moral susceptibility. Silas earns a fortune in the paint business, but he lacks social standards, which he tries to attain through his daughter's marriage into the aristocratic Corey family. Silas' morality does not fail him. He loses his money but makes the right moral decision when his partner proposes the unethical selling of the mills to English settlers. The resolution of the love triangle of Irene Lapham, Tom Corey, and Penelope Lapham highlights Howells' rejection of the conventions of sentimental romantic novels as unrealistic and deceitful. William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright. He was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His stories of Boston upper crust life set in the 1850s are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

A National Book Award Finalist, a New York Times bestseller and one of the most highly-acclaimed books of the year, A Hologram for the King is a sprawling novel about the decline of American industry from one of the most important, socially-aware novelists of our time. In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman named Alan Clay pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy's gale-force winds. This taut, richly layered, and elegiac novel is a powerful evocation of our contemporary moment--and a moving story of how we got here.

The unforgettable journey of an American businessman—from his humble origins to his extraordinary successes—and the compromises he made along the way When Willis Wayde first lays eyes on the Harcourt mansion near Clyde, Massachusetts, he is fifteen years old. His father is an engineer at Harcourt Mill, and Willis is awestruck by the family’s wealth and power. Seeking guidance from Henry Harcourt, Willis meets Bess, the old man’s granddaughter. Their friendship eventually blossoms into love as the elder Harcourt takes the young man under his wing, recognizing in Willis a kindred spirit whose instinct for making money matches his own. Pleased with his good fortune, Willis is nevertheless acutely aware of the great social gulf that separates the Waydes from the Harcourts. Determined to make his own way, he sets out on a path that will take him far beyond New England and the insular, old-money world of Henry and Bess. Then the Depression hits, wiping out the Harcourt family fortune. When he comes back into their life, Willis has the power to rescue the last vestige of the family’s prestige: the mill. Torn between his nostalgia for a simpler, more sentimental time and his sharply honed business acumen, Willis must make a fateful decision.

Originally published in London in 1857 and never before available in paperback, The Garies and Their Friends is the second novel published by an African American and the first to chronicle the experience of free blacks in the pre-Civil War northeast. The novel anticipates themes that were to become important in later African American fiction, including miscegenation and 'passing, ' and tells the story of the Garies and their friends, the Ellises, a 'highly respectable and industrious coloured family.'

"A man is the sum of his misfortunes." --William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“I have used the Norton Critical Editions since graduate school. As a teacher of high-school literature, I find them to be excellent resources for the study of various novels, plays, etc."—Brooke Gifford, Vincent Middle High School This Norton Critical Edition includes: • The annotated text of Kate Chopin’s modernist novel of marital infidelity, set in New Orleans and Grande Isle, Louisiana. • A preface, a critical essay, and explanatory annotations by Margo Culley. • Essays by acclaimed Chopin biographers Per Seyersted and Emily Toth, “An Etiquette/Advice Book Sampler” with selections from the conduct books of the period, and contemporary perspectives on womanhood, motherhood, and marriage. • Forty-five reviews and interpretive essays on The Awakening spanning three centuries. • A Chronology of Chopin’s life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

No one can complain that in this story Mr. Howells has taken his type from the commonplace. It is a study of life in New York, and the author has brought together such a gallery of odd and strongly differentiated characters as could perhaps be found in no other city on the continent, while the conditions and phases of social life represented are not less distinctive and peculiar. The Marches, it is true, are from Boston, but they serve the purpose of external points of observation, whence to note and sufficiently to emphasize those features of our city life which of necessity strike strangers and outsiders most forcibly and with the greatest freshness of suggestion. A new magazine is founded with the money of old Dryfoos, a "natural gas millionaire," whose primary object is to give his son Conrad — a youth of saint-like character and dominant altruism — opportunity to become a businessman. The prime mover of the venture is Fulkerson, a true Western Yankee, if the phrase be allowable, whose engaging impudence, fluent slang, indomitable assurance, and substantial loyalty and goodness of heart are sure to make him as great a favorite with the reader as he is with all who know him in the story. The Marches, too, are fantastic, and nowhere has Mr. Howells better presented that peculiar American humor which finds motives for half-sarcastic jest and quip in even the most serious things, less out of lightness of heart than from an almost desperate conscious ness of hopeless incongruities and perplexities inherent in the general scheme. The picture is in itself a condemnation of and protest against that rank growth of naked materialism which is the most depressing feature of our time. The character and the faults of society are shown plainly but temperately — the spirit of levity, the love of spectacle, the repugnance to serious thinking, the absence of jealousy of popular rights, constantly encroached upon, ignored and subordinated to selfish corporate or individual interests. The aspects of the city are also most graphically and admirably described in many a wandering of the Marches, and the book exhibits an amount of local study undertaken by the author which speaks well for his conscientiousness, and adds much to the charm and permanent interest of the story. There is, as we have intimated, an unwonted variety and an unwonted force in " A Hazard of New Fortunes." If it can hardly be said to have a dominant note, it is none the less a faithful and carefully elaborated study of New York life, and it presents some of the most salient characteristics of that life in a very impressive and artistic manner. Most readers will, we think, agree with us that the change in method here shown is a change for the better. Never, certainly, has Mr. Howells written more brilliantly, more clearly, more firmly, or more attractively, than in this instance. The reversion to these strong individualizations seems to have put new vigor into his hands, and he deals with the deeper tragedies, the graver emotions of life, with a power which may perhaps be regarded as a practical demonstration of the ultimate supremacy destined to be attained by Nature over Art ; by the true over the false Realism.