The Rise of Silas Lapham (Norton Critical Editions)

by WilliamDeanHowells (Author), Don L . Cook (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1982

  $9.62

  Extensive historical annotations have been added to the text of this Norton Critical Edition.
  
  The process of composition is followed through Howells' initial sketches and letters. Analysis of the contemporary stereotypes and myths that Howells parodied in his novel is provided by Robert Falk, Clark W. Bryan, Theodore Dreiser, and Robie Macauley, and by letters from Roswell Smith to Howells.
  
  Contemporary responses by friends and readers, and by critics, illustrate the misunderstanding and hostility with which realistic fiction was sometimes greeted in Howells' time. Critical essays by Donald Pizer, William R. Manierre II, John E. Hart, Harold H. Kolb, George N. Bennett, Everett Carter, and G. Thomas Tanselle represent a variety of ways in which the novel has engaged the attention of critics as well as a broad selection of the critical methods that have been applied to it.
  
  As one of the primary documents of American literary realism, the novel raises questions as to the meaning and utility of realism as an aesthetic ideal. These questions are treated in essays by C. Hugh Holman, Henry James, Larzer Ziff, Edwin H. Cady, Robert M. Figg, Charles L. Campbell, and Howells himself.
  
  A Selected Bibliography is also included.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $4.14

  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.