The Rise of Silas Lapham (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Softcover

Howells, William Dean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1593082878 ISBN 13: 9781593082871

Publisher: Sterling Publishing, 2007

Synopsis

The Rise of Silas Lapham, by William Dean Howells, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences biographical, historical, and literary to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. After the Civil War, rapid industrialization created a new crop of American multimillionaires. Although as wealthy as the aristocrats” of Boston and New York, the nouveaux riches were rejected by those arrogant guardians of traditional society because of their uneducated” tastes and uncouth styles. This class conflict is at the core of The Rise of Silas Lapham, one of the first American novels of manners, one of the first to look at the American businessman and self-made millionaire, and one of the first to employ realism a style that would come to dominate twentieth-century American fiction.
 
A devoted husband and father, fairly decent employer, and mostly honest businessman, Silas Lapham has used his father’s small paint company to amass a large fortune. But he yearns to enter society” and for his two daughters, Penelope and Irene, to marry well. However, blue-blooded Tom Corey’s love for one of the Lapham daughters is thwarted by his mother, who believes Penelope is an overly independent social climber. Meanwhile, Silas’s efforts to be accepted by the Boston Brahmins lead him into dangerous financial waters that threaten to drown his business and swallow his family. Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a senior fellow of the Center for the Humanities, which he founded. His latest book is a collection of essays, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World. He is completing a cultural history of the United States in the 1930s.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sterling Publishing
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1593082878
• ISBN 13: 9781593082871
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400