The complete online text of A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells.

William Dean Howells, whose literary career began on the eve of the Civil War and ended after World War I, is one of the three most important American writers of the late nineteenth century. Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Henry James, both of whom were his...

William Dean Howells , whose literary career began on the eve of the Civil War and ended after World War I, is one of the three most important American writers of the late nineteenth century. Samuel Clemens and Henry James, both of whom were his close fr...

William Dean Howells combined a career as an important novelist with that of a journalist. As editor of The Atlantic Monthly and later as author of, or contributor to, the "Editor's Study" and "Editor's Easy Chair" columns in Harper's Monthly, he was an...

As its title suggests, William Dean Howells's A Modern Instance (1882) is an examination of the representatively "modern." This examination is set, like Howells's other major realist novels (The Rise of Silas Lapham [1885], A Hazard of New Fortunes [1890]), in the expanding...

Although William Dean Howells is most frequently credited with the advent of literary realism, the intricate ninth chapter of his well-known 1882 novel, A Modern Instance,(1) suggests that the "Dean of American Letters" also nostalgically embraced the lost ideals of Thoreauvian transcendentalism. For...