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....

A major figure in nineteenth-century letters, Howells influenced a generation of American writers. In this tale, a young doctor abroad is asked to heal a beautiful woman who has mysteriously lost her memory. He must explore the boundaries between memory, sleep, and knowing-and finally, he must explore his own heart.

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1903. Howells was an American realist author. He wrote for various magazines including Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine. His career blossomed after the publication of his first realist novel, A Modern Instance. The Son of Royal Langbrith begins: We're neither of us young people, I know, and I can very well believe that you had not thought of marrying again. I can account for your surprise at my offer, even your disgust- Dr. Anther hesitated. Oh no! Mrs. Langbrith protested. But I can't see why it should be terrible as you call it. If you had asked me simply to take no for an answer, I could have taken it. Or taken it better. He looked at her with a wounded air, and she said, I didn't mean terrible in that way. I was only thinking of it for myself, or not so much myself as-some one. She glanced at him, where, tenderly indignant with her, he stood by the window, quite across the room, and she seemed to wish to say more but let her eyes drop without saying more. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing....

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1920 Original Publisher: Harper...

The Rise of Silas Lapham was the first important novel to center on the American businessman and the first to treat its theme with a realism that foreshadowed the work of modern writers. In his story of one of the millionaire industrialists who flourished in the post-Civil War years, William Dean Howells probes the moral and social conflicts that confront a self-made man trying to crash Boston’s old-guard aristocracy. Silas Lapham is a man of conscience who fully realizes his folly; but he is also an ambitious man who lets his aspirations lead him to risk both his fortune and his family’s happiness for status in a society that will never truly accept him. “His perceptions were sure, his integrity was absolute,” wrote Henry Seidel Canby of William Dean Howells, whom he credited as being “responsible for giving the American novel form.”...