The Rise of Silas Lapham - Softcover

Howells, William Dean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451511212 ISBN 13: 9780451511218

Publisher: Signet Classics, 1963

Synopsis

The Rise of Silas Lapham is a realist novel by William Dean Howells published in 1885. The story follows the materialistic rise of Silas Lapham from rags to riches, and his ensuing moral susceptibility. Silas earns a fortune in the paint business, but he lacks social standards, which he tries to attain through his daughter's marriage into the aristocratic Corey family. Silas' morality does not fail him. He loses his money but makes the right moral decision when his partner proposes the unethical selling of the mills to English settlers.Howells is known to be the father of American realism, and a denouncer of the sentimental novel. The resolution of the love triangle of Irene Lapham, Tom Corey, and Penelope Lapham highlights Howells' rejection of the conventions of sentimental romantic novels as unrealistic and deceitful.

About this title

From the Publisher

The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is Howell’s best-known work, and this elegant tale of Boston society and manners is rightly regarded as a subtle classic of its time. Silas Lapham inherits his father’s paint business, from which he makes a great deal of money, and moves his family from rural Vermont to cosmopolitan Boston. Attempting to break into the city’s sophisticated society he becomes bent on the acquisition of both money and social position. Howells contrasts "old" and "new" money, presenting the representatives of both sympathetically and portraying the attempts of the self-made man to break into the world inhabited by those from "established" families with humour and delicacy.

From the Back Cover

Silas Lapham is a rough-hewn entrepreneur who has made his fortune in mineral paint. Socially ambitious for their daughters, Lapham and his wife encourage the suit of Tom Corey, son of an aristocratic Boston family, whose own parents are appalled by his consorting with vulgar upstarts. But which Lapham girl does Tom really love: the pretty blonde Irene or her bookish sister Penelope? As the romantic confusion is sorted out, Lapham suffers calamities that threaten both his financial and personal integrity. His rise is ultimately a moral one. The first major American novel to centre on a businessman, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) explores the capitalist ethos of the American Gilded Age. It is also a brilliant novel of manners that shows the comic confrontation of old wealth and new riches.

Edition details

• Publisher: Signet Classics
• Publication date: 1963
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451511212
• ISBN 13: 9780451511218
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback