The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Landlord at Lion's Head, Complete
by William Dean Howells

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Title: The Landlord at Lion's Head, Complete

Author: William Dean Howells

Last Updated: February 27, 2009
Release Date: August 22, 2006 [EBook #4645]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD, ***

Produced by David Widger

THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD

By William Dean Howells

Part I.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

In those dim recesses of the consciousness where things have their
beginning, if ever things have a beginning, I suppose the origin of this
novel may be traced to a fact of a fortnight's sojourn on the western
shore of lake Champlain in the summer of 1891. Across the water in the
State of Vermont I had constantly before my eyes a majestic mountain
form which the earlier French pioneers had named "Le Lion Couchant,"
but which their plainer-minded Yankee successors preferred to call
"The Camel's Hump." It really looked like a sleeping lion; the head was
especially definite; and when, in the course of some ten years, I found
the scheme for a story about a summer hotel which I had long meant to
write, this image suggested the name of 'The Landlord at Lion's Head.' I
gave the title to my unwritten novel at once and never wished to change
it, but rejoiced in the certainty that, whatever the novel turned out to
be, the title could not be better.

I began to write the story four years later, when we were settled for
the winter in our flat on Central Park, and as I was a year in doing it,
with other things, I must have taken the unfinished manuscript to and
from Magnolia, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, Long Island, where I spent
the following summer. It was first serialized in Harper's Weekly and in
the London Illustrated News, as well as in an Australian newspaper--I
forget which one; and it was published as a completed book in 1896.

I remember concerning it a very becoming despair when, at a certain
moment in it, I began to wonder what I was driving at. I have always had
such moments in my work, and if I cannot fitly boast of them, I can at
least own to them in freedom