The American Novel |
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actual adventures American novel appears Atlantic Ben-Hur Boston Bret Harte called career century CHAPTER characters Charlotte Temple charm Civil color Cooper Crawford critical dime novel doctrines dreams early England epic episodes Europe European fact forest frontier Hawthorne Hawthorne's Henry James hero heroine Hester Houghton Mifflin Howells Howells's Huckleberry Finn Hugh Wynne human humor imagination Indian Irving James's John Lapham later Leather-Stocking less literary literature lived manners Mark Twain matter Melville Mississippi Moby Dick moral narrative Nathaniel Hawthorne native Natty Natty Bumppo nature never novelists older passion patriotism persons plot popular Princess Casamassima published Puritan realism Revolution romance satire Sawyer Scarlet Letter scene Scott seems sentimental short stories Simms spirit style tale taste theme thought tion Tom Sawyer touched truth Uncle Tom's Cabin Virginia virtues William Dean Howells women write wrote Yankee York youth
Popular passages
Page 95 - If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.
Page 80 - I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars ; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart...
Page 171 - YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.
Page 180 - I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning — well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race.
Page 190 - It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult.
Page 184 - In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever— for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!
Page 72 - ... millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while...
Page 95 - The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience.
Page 135 - As in literature the true artist will shun the use even of real events if they are of an improbable character, so the sincere observer of man will not desire to look upon his heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness.
Page 91 - As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary...