Manners, Morals, and Mince Pie: Howells's America Revisited

Abstract

When lionel trilling delivered an important lecture on William Dean Howells more than thirty years ago at Harvard, he began with an anecdote that helps to move us directly into Howells country. Offering a course on American literature at Columbia College, Trilling “imagined that it might be useful to [his] students to have a notion of the cultural and social situation which Howells described,” and he therefore “spent a considerable time talking about [Howells's] books”; whereupon, Trilling reports, “I received the first anonymous letter I have ever had from a student-it warned me that the lapse of taste shown by my excessive interest in a dull writer was causing a scandal in the cafeterias.”