SOURCE: "'His Apparition': The Howells No One Believes In," in American Literary Realism, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 85-9.

In the following essay, Feigenoff underscores the psychological nature of Howells's ghost story, "His Apparition."

In "His Apparition" William Dean Howells shrewdly manipulates the ghost story so that the emphasis is on the real rather than the supernatural. He does this by giving us a ghost story without a ghost. Not only does the story open immediately after Arthur Hewson has seen his apparition—an apparition which, despite his expectations, he never sees again—but this apparition is never even described. Although Hewson, overcoming his initial reticence, brings his story out again and again at his club and over dinner, Howells resists the temptation to provide us with a single shred of spectral detail and goes out of his way to avoid the sensational. From the very beginning Hewson...