The complete online text of Short Stories and Essays (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...

THE BOY TAUNTED the yali all summer long.* Any given day that summer, I would have liked being the moss covering the broken stones of the pier, just at the water's edge. Perhaps. Not that I envied the moss. Rather, because I...

It's Sunday. Sundays are always the worst. On a Sunday, when the housework is done, the floor gleaming, the washing hung in staggered sleeves of colour on the line, when there is nothing on the "IV and not even a crime book...

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for fiction Wednesday, beating such celebrated nominees as Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan.The $120,000 prize is awarded every two years for a body of fiction.Achebe, 76, is best known for his first...

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking...