PEBBLES, MONOCHROMES, AND OTHER MODERN POEMS, 1891-1916

by William Dean Howells & edited by Edwin H. Cady ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2000

Cady does a creditable job and performs a valuable service in bringing this important and long-overlooked work of a modern...

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Howells was among the first "Western" poets (as those beyond the Hudson were once described) to bridge the gap between elegant, formal Victorian poetry and fully modern American verse. He was steeped in both the waning literary traditions and the newly emergent trends of realism and social justice of the1880s. First claiming national attention for his poetry in 1860, he rose to prominence over the next three decades as an author, playwright, humorous essayist, and novelist. Perhaps the work best known to modern readers is his novel, The Undiscovered Country. The event that most influenced the work of later years featured in Cady's collection was the death in 1889 of Howells's young daughter Winifred. Though he inherited the poetic legacy of Tennyson and Longfellow, Howells was an experimenter in terms of both the "decadence" of his themes and the musicality of his verse (which nevertheless permitted a degree of modern dissonance). While he rejected vers libre and often favored triplets, he was no slave to the classical dictates of strict meter and rhyme. Often his lines scanned loosely and his rhymes were inexact or nonexistent. To critics during the period when "Manifest Destiny" was in force, the dark tone, intensity, and pervasive sadness of his poetry indicated his potential as a decadent writer. His tender conscience and compassionate espousal of the radical social causes of the time reinforced this impression. Howells strove to avoid what he termed "literose" writing (based on other writings rather than actual experience), and he suggested that "realism excludes nothing that is true."

Cady does a creditable job and performs a valuable service in bringing this important and long-overlooked work of a modern Howells to light.

Pub Date: April 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-8214-1318-X

Page Count: 188

Publisher: Ohio Univ.

Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.