A Hazard of New Fortunes

A Hazard of New Fortunes

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Title: A Hazard of New Fortunes, Complete
Author: William Dean Howells
Edition: 11
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4600] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 13, 2002]
[This file was last updated on March 3,2002]

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HAZARD
OF NEW FORTUNES ***

This etext was produced by David Widger

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making
an entire meal of them. D.W.]

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
By William Dean Howells

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
The following story was the first fruit of my New York life when I
began to live it after my quarter of a century in Cambridge and Boston,
ending in 1889; and I used my own transition to the commercial
metropolis in framing the experience which was wholly that of my
supposititious literary adventurer. He was a character whom, with his
wife, I have employed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I
made as much the hero and heroine of 'Their Wedding Journey' as the
slight fable would bear. In venturing out of my adoptive New England,
where I had found myself at home with many imaginary friends, I
found it natural to ask the company of these familiar acquaintances, but
their company was not to be had at once for the asking. When I began
speaking of them as Basil and Isabel, in the fashion of 'Their Wedding
Journey,' they would not respond with the effect of early middle age
which I desired in them. They remained wilfully, not to say woodenly,
the young bridal pair of that romance, without the promise of novel
functioning. It was not till I tried addressing them as March and Mrs.
March that they stirred under my hand with fresh impulse, and set
about the work assigned them as people in something more than their

second youth.
The scene into which I had invited them to figure filled the largest
canvas I had yet allowed myself; and, though 'A Hazard of New
Fortunes was not the first story I had written with the printer at my
heels, it was the first which took its own time to prescribe its own
dimensions. I had the general design well in mind when I began to
write it, but as it advanced it compelled into its course incidents,
interests, individualities, which I had not known lay near, and it
specialized and amplified at points which I had not always meant to
touch, though I should not like to intimate anything mystical in the fact.
It became, to my thinking, the most vital of my fictions, through my
quickened interest in the life about me, at a moment of great
psychological import. We had passed through a period of strong
emotioning in the direction of the humaner economics, if I may phrase
it so; the rich seemed not so much to despise the poor, the poor did not
so hopelessly repine. The solution of the riddle of the painful earth
through the dreams of Henry George, through the dreams of Edward
Bellamy, through the dreams of all the generous visionaries of the past,
seemed not impossibly far off. That shedding of blood which is for the
remission of sins had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of
Chicago, and the hearts of those who felt the wrongs bound up with our
rights, the slavery implicated in our liberty, were thrilling with griefs
and hopes hitherto strange to the average American breast. Opportunely
for me there was a great street-car strike in New York, and the