William Dean Howells

A foregone conclusion relates the love story of Florida Vervain, a young girl sojourning in Venice with her mother, an amiable, weak-headed woman, of the type so frequently drawn by the author. The daughter is beloved by the United States consul, a Mr. Ferris, and by Don Ippopolito, a priest. The latter is a strongly drawn, interesting study. He is a man whom circumstances rather than inclination led into the priesthood. From the hour of his ordination...

Theodore Colville was a respected newspaperman from Indiana who leaves the business and travels to Florence, Italy. There he meets Mrs. Bowen, a widow with her young daughter Efie. A twenty year old blonde girl named Imogene Graham is also residing with Mrs. Bowen. Eventually attractions, misunderstandings and eventually love blossom amongst the love triangle of Theodore, Imogene, and Mrs. Bowen.

Published in 1910, this book is a testament to the long friendship between Howells and Twain. "Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists," Howells writes, "they were like one another and like other literary men, but Clemens [Twain] was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature." The second half of the book collects Howells's perceptive reviews of Twain's works.

If I were to sell the reader a barrel of molasses, and he, instead of sweetening his substantial dinner with the same at judicious intervals, should eat the entire barrel at one sitting, and then abuse me for making him sick, I would say that he deserved to be made sick for not knowing any better how to utilize the blessings this world affords. And if I sell to the reader this volume of nonsense, and he, instead of seasoning his graver reading with...

Should a son who's delusional about his dead father be told the truth? That in fact, his father was a scoundrel who tyrannized his wife? That is the ethical dilemma in this tale by author William Dean Howells, dealing with questions of loyalty, honor, family, and honesty.

William Dean Howells frequently drew on his Midwestern childhood for his fiction. Based on an incident in Ohio that had always fascinated him, The Leatherwood God tells the intriguing tale of how a charlatan named Joseph Dylks, claiming to be a messenger of God (or even God himself), exploited the pious townspeople, split their devout community in two, and then disappeared.