The complete online text of Confessions of a Summer Colonist (from Literature and Life) 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...

My dining room hutch holds a more or less permanent pile of books -- alleged vacation reading -- that looks poised to leave the house at a moment's notice. I dust them all from time to time, occasionally rearrange them, hiding the most ponderous...

Today's New Englanders may not think of the West Indies when they prepare for Christmas. But in the 18th century, the average colonist associated fine holiday dining with the luxuries that came from "spice islands" in the Caribbean. "There was definitely a...