The Project Gutenberg EBook of First Visit to New England and Others
by William Dean Howells

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Title: First Visit to New England and Others
From "Literary Friends And Acquaintances"

Author: William Dean Howells

Release Date: August 22, 2006 [EBook #3398]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND ***

Produced by David Widger

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES

by William Dean Howells

CONTENTS:

Biographical
My First Visit to New England
First Impressions of Literary New York

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--First Visit to New England
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to
write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives
of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near them. In
fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I let
the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save
such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but
not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work.
Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and,
though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my
impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to
impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring
to share them with the reader.

The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay
under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first
years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that
periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it
had been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and it
was therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine. It was the paper
with which I took the most pains, and when it was complete