Literary Friends and Acquaintance

Literary Friends And
Acquaintances, by

William Dean Howells This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere
at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it,
give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg
License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Literary Friends And Acquaintances
Author: William Dean Howells
Release Date: October 28, 2006 [EBook #4201]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY
FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES ***

Produced by David Widger

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
by William Dean Howells

CONTENTS:
Biographical My First Visit to New England First Impressions of
Literary New York Roundabout to Boston Literary Boston As I Knew
It Oliver Wendell Holmes The White Mr. Longfellow Studies of
Lowell Cambridge Neighbors A Belated Guest My Mark Twain

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had
meant to write of literary history in New England as I had known it in
the lives of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near
them. In fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them;
but I let the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without
record save such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the
common, but not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke
it for my work. Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient
abundance; and, though I now wish I could have remembered more
instances, I think my impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of
having tried honestly to impart them in the ten years or more when I
was desultorily endeavoring to share them with the reader.
The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay
under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the
first years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that
periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it had
been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and it was
therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine. It was the paper with
which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt it so
incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend, the late

Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting in unity;
it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must do
something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect of
portraiture; and this I did my best to do.
It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not
look upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three,
Holmes often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of
his forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly
literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New
England in quality.
While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes
less slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in
Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many
other things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter
stories, with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900,
I had not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to
complete my reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed
it. When they were all done at last they were republished in a volume
which found instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.
There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends
and Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I
remained satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more
accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call
the book by that name who likes.
Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of the
kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly
after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been
preparing