SOURCE: "Psychic and Psychological Themes in Howells' 'A Sleep and a Forgetting'," in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1977, pp. 41-51.

In the following essay, Crowley and Crow explore psychological, psychic, and autobiographical themes in Howells's "A Sleep and a Forgetting."

I

One tenet of W. D. Howells' realism was the primacy of the commonplace. Early in his career, he insisted: "As in literature the true artist will shun the use even of real events if they are of an improbable character, so the sincere observer of man will not desire to look upon his heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such times very precious. . . ."¹ Howells championed this belief in his criticism, and in his fiction he staked his literary reputation on it.

It was with disquiet...