William Dean Howells
3 books
- Half the fun is watching Basil and Isabel March bicker their way through New York apartment hunting before the book quietly turns serious, with a streetcar strike and old Dryfoos's money pulling everyone apart. It's slow and talky in the best way, if you like your realism gentle but pointed.
- Colville is forty-one, drifting around Florence, and half-talks himself into an engagement with a girl of twenty who thinks she's restoring his lost youth. It's gentle, funny in a dry way, and quietly wise about middle age; nothing explodes, but the conversations are a pleasure.
- Silas is a paint millionaire who wants Boston society to like him, and the dinner party where he drinks too much wine and talks too long is genuinely painful to read, in the best way. It's quiet and moral, but Howells makes decency feel dramatic.