2 - Helpless Longing, or, the Lesson of Silas Lapham

Summary

Our descendants will find nowhere so faithful and so pleasing a picture of our American existence, and no writer is likely to rival Mr. Howells in this idealization of the commonplace. The vein which Mr. Howells has struck is hardly a deep one. His dexterity in following it, and in drawing out its slightest resources, seems at times almost marvellous, a perpetual succession of feats of sleight-of-hand, all the more remarkable because the critical reader alone will understand how difficult such feats are, and how much tact and wit is needed to escape a mortifying failure.

–Henry Adams, The North American Review, 1872

William Dean Howells was not the first novelist to understand the critical possibilities inherent in the realistic novel; he had learned much from his European predecessors in the style. His claim to fame, however, rests upon his having been an American who chose to bring these possibilities to bear upon uniquely American materials at a time when, as the critics would have it, the norms of Puritan and genteel literature, of the romance, were no longer adequate to portraying the new world of the post–Civil War United States. Newton Arvin once gave voice to this way of judging Howells when he wrote in The New Republic that

he was the first of our important imaginative writers thoughtfully to consider and intelligently to comprehend what was happening to the form and quality of American life as it moved away from the simplicity, the social fluidity, the relative freedoms, of the mid-century toward the ugly disharmonies of monopolism and empire.