Excerpts from The Rise of Silas Lapham

By William Dean Howells

Originally published in 1885

Reprinted by Signet Classic in 2002

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was a journalist, a well-known literary critic, and a popular writer of novels, poetry, travel essays, plays, and short stories. His most famous book, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), captured the changes taking place in the social world of Boston in the 1880s, when the "new rich"—people from humble backgrounds who had made a fortune in the industrial era—were entering the once-exclusive circles of the city's old ruling class of wealthy and elite. The novel presents Howells's vision of a more democratic and tolerant, if less cultured, American society of the future and introduced business and industry as an essential subject in fiction writing during the industrial age.

Howells was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, and...