SOURCE: "'A Dream': Howells' Early Contribution to the American Short Story," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. IV, No. 1, January, 1974, pp. 75-85.

In the following essay, Marler cites "A Dream" as Howells's first successful attempt at realistic fiction and relates it to his unpublished novel Geoffrey Winter.

Buried beneath William Dean Howells' mountain of writing is an early short story that deserves attention. "A Dream," which the Knickerbocker published in August 1861,¹ three months before Howells left the country to become consul in Venice, is his first work of fiction to show a mature craftsmanship. Measured against the thousands of subliterary tales that during the eighteen-fifties flooded the magazine market to produce the mainstream of our short fiction, Howells' ironic love story has an unrecognized significance in the history of the American short story: Among short works by major writers published before the Civil War, with the exception...