| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

William Dean Howells: A Writer's Life. By Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xxvi, 519 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-520-23896-6.)

The first full-scale biography of William Dean Howells in a generation, this book is a thoroughly researched and absorbing study of the man who, in the early twentieth century, became known as the dean of American letters. The authors make excellent use of Howell's extensive published work and private letters to create a nuanced portrait of the writer and his era. If Sinclair Lewis famously dismissed Howells as "a pious old maid whose greatest delight is to have tea at the vicarage," Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson uncover a much darker Howells, whose brooding contemplation of injustice and suffering informed much of his writing (Henry May, The End of American Innocence, 1959, p. 8).

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