Can it have been fifty-five years ago that Lionel Trilling, in one of his long, graceful, revaluative essays, examined the question of whether William Dean Howells was, as a novelist, any more than—in Trilling’s cautious word—“engaging”? Trilling juxtaposed him with Mark Twain and Henry James, both of them admiring friends of Howells, and noted that, […]

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