Howells and "Leverage"

Modern Robin Hoods in an Urban Jungle

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

On the face of it, “Leverage,” a new drama that seems to have drawn its inspiration broadly and in disproportionate measure from “Ocean’s Eleven,” William Dean Howells and Encyclopedia Brown, comes to us this grim December with a certain prescience. The series (beginning on Sunday on TNT) devotes itself to the deflation of fat cats who have stolen, burned, bribed, defrauded: capitalist victimizers who are pierced each week by the slings and arrows of a band of independent hackers, thieves and grifters suddenly bound together to rectify the wrongs of economic disparity.

Howells and Obama

New York Review of Books:

Time is on our side again, and maybe a great deal of the emotion that overtook us on 125th Street had to do with those who are no longer with us, those who did not live to see this moment. I voted with thoughts of the absent. And we now can feel we are back on the side of History. Signed, sealed, delivered—we're his, but we'd expect that President-elect Obama would know all about the misgivings that men like Henry Adams and William Tecumseh Sherman had when Abraham Lincoln first arrived in Washington. People were desperate for direction, the air reeked of war, and the new president seemed so indecisive and quiet. Young men laughed nervously in the anteroom, William Dean Howells observed, as "the great soul enter[ed] upon its travail beyond the closed door." May the spirit of Lincoln continue to guide this unexpected and already much-trusted young black man about to move his family into the White House.

Lionel Trilling and Howells

From the Post-Gazette:

"Trilling's popularity then seemed just as unlikely as it would today," Arac said, contrasting the 1950s with the mid-19th-century when Americans believed "literature had power."

"Century [Illustrated] Magazine had a circulation of more than 100,000 in the 1880s when it published James 'The Bostonians' and William Dean Howells' 'The Rise of Silas Lapham,' " he said.

"Trilling's work was published in The Partisan Review with a circulation less than 3,000."

Yet, his essays in the 1950 collection, particularly "Reality in America," seemed "to hit a culture nerve" in the Cold War.

Howells and realism, Howells and Boston

From a review of Philip Roth's new novel, London Telegraph:

The great American realist William Dean Howells referred to the benefit of being faithful to "poor Real Life", the force attained from the pressure of its "vast, natural, unaffected dullness". Roth has dulled his style to this mimetic realism precisely in order to reveal the pressure of Fifties America: "the rectitude tyrannizing my life, the constricting rectitude" that afflicts Marcus.

From The Phoenix (Boston):

Going further back, novelist William Dean Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," was a hard-core Hub loyalist who once decreed, "The Bostonian who leaves Boston ought to be condemned to perpetual exile." He relocated to New York in 1891, and had one of his characters, making a similar move, liken Boston to a living death.

Of course, the irony is that Howells wound up not caring much for NYC, either, and spent a lot of time looking longingly back at Boston, as many who have followed in his footsteps do, and will continue to do indefinitely, or at least until rents get cheap enough to again tilt the balance away from our native reserve and standoffishness long enough for an arts scene to cohere, as it did in the '80s and early '90s in a big way.

Howells inducted into Martins Ferry Hall of Fame

Thanks to Greg Neubauer for this announcement.

Howells inducted into Martins Ferry Hall of Fame

Martins Ferry's local paper write-up:
http://www.timesleaderonline.com/page/content.detail/id/503071.html

Martins Ferry Public Library announcement:
http://mfpl.org/hallhonor.asp

Photograph of Howells at the National Portrait Gallery

From the new exhibit of the photographs of Zaida Ben-Yusuf:

William Dean Howells visited Ben-Yusuf’s studio in the fall of 1899, just weeks before embarking on a lengthy North American lecture tour. Despite a backbreaking travel schedule, Howell’s lectures were a triumph with both critics and audiences and another professional coup for one of American literature’s most celebrated writers.

Picture at http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/zaida/gallery/oldguard03.html

Howells Society News

From Sanford Marovitz, Editor of _The Howellsian_:

Howells Society Dinner at the Tavern Club
4 Boylston Place, Boston
Friday, May 25, 2007 at 7 p.m.

Many of you at the ALA conference six years ago may recall the superb dinner
our Society enjoyed at the Tavern Club; the evening was enhanced by splendid
dining and camaraderie in the inspiring atmosphere of Old Boston during the
late 19th century.  Now we are planning to do it again!  The W. D. Howells
Society will sponsor a dinner during this year's American Literature
Association Conference in Boston at the historic Tavern Club, of which W. D.
Howells was the first president. 

Menu

Cocktails and hors d'oeuvres before dinner
Salad
Beef Tenderloin with vegetable and starch
Dessert
Coffee or Tea
Wine with dinner

Sufficient non-meat dishes will be available for vegetarians.

The all-inclusive price, with tip, for members and their guests is $70 each;
for non-members the price is $80, but for those who wish to join the Society
and send $10 dues to the treasurer before or with their dinner reservations,
the dinner price for themselves and their guests will be reduced by $10 per
person.

Reservations should be made by May 5 so that a final count can be submitted
to the Tavern Club.  If you would like to attend, please mail your check in
U. S. funds (payable to the "W. D. Howells Society") to

Dr. Elsa Nettels
211 Indian Spring Rd.
Williamsburg, VA 23185.

Please indicate how your check should be divided ($80 for nonmember or $70
for a member/$10 for WDHS membership).

Please note that this will be a very special evening in the magnificent
historic Tavern Club, an event to anticipate with joy-and you'll be in great
company!

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Howells Society Excursion
**********************************************************************

As on the day following our Tavern Club dinner in 2001, the Society has
scheduled again a bus excursion to the Howells family home at Kittery Point.
It will begin when we board the bus at our hotel on Saturday morning at 9
and end in mid-afternoon the same day; the bus will leave Kittery Point at 2
and arrive back at the hotel in time for participants to have the late
afternoon in Boston.  Box lunches will be provided.  Although the Society
has done this before, we may not have a chance to do it again, so if you'd
like to visit the Howells Memorial Home, on a truly gorgeous site, this
spring is the time to do it. 

A short program there will include an informal discussion by Susan Goodman
and Carl Dawson on writing their distinguished biography, William Dean
Howells: A Writer's Life (2005), with remarks by Sarah Daugherty and others;
comments and questions from the floor will be welcome.  Through the
generosity of the William Dean Howells Memorial Committee, to whom the
Society is grateful indeed, the full cost of the excursion for all
participants will be covered.  If you wish to participate in this special
"happening" at the Howells Memorial, please notify Susan Goodman by e-mail:
<sgoodman at english.udel.edu.  Because we expect a large turnout and bus seats
are limited, it would be advisable to let her know as soon as possible.
Membership in the Society is not required.

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Two William Dean Howells Society Sessions at the 2007 ALA Conference
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Howells and Marriage I

Chair: Elsa Nettels, College of William and Mary
1.  "A Grammar of Marriage: Love in Spite of Syntax in Silas Lapham,"
William Rodney Herring, University of Texas
2.  "The Art of Marriage: Taking the Woman Artist as Wife in A Hazard of New
Fortunes," Sherry Li, National Taiwan University
3. "Marriage and the American Medical Woman in Dr. Breen's Practice,"
Frederick Wegener, California State University, Long Beach Howells and
Marriage II

Chair: Susan Goodman, University of Delaware

1. "Movement, Modernity, and the Marriage of Elinor Mead and William Dean
Howells," Elif Armbruster, Suffolk University

2. "Love in Leisure Spaces: Tourism, Courtship, and Marriage in _The Coast
of Bohemia_ and _An Open-Eyed Conspiracy_,"  Donna Campbell, Washington
State University

3.  "If You Liked That, You'll Like This: Howells and Theodor Fontane on
Marriage," Richard Ellington, Independent Scholar

4.  "A 'Record of Young Married Love': Marriage in William Dean Howells'
Criticism and Reviews," Rachel Ihara, City University of New York