First Impressions of Literary New York

Howells claimed that to be published in the Saturday Press was to be in his "company" (63).

According to Howells, without Clapp's help publicizing Leaves of Grass, Whitman's book would have been hopeless.

Howells doesn't refer to her by name, but it's clear from the context that he's talking about Clare.

Howells states that "It was said, so far west as Ohio, that the queen of the Bohemia sometimes came to Pfaff's: a young girl of sprightly gift in letters, whose name or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose fate, pathetic at times, out-tragedies almost any other in the history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow cast backward upon Pfaff's, whose name often figured in the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the Saturday Press" (64).

Howells claimed that to be published in the Saturday Press was to be in his "company" (63).

Howells claimed that to be published in the Saturday Press was to be in his "company" (63).

Howells begins a discussion of O'Brien's military career by mentioning O'Brien's literary successes with the story of "The Diamond Lens" and a ghost story. Howells mentions that upon his return to New York he found out that O'Brien had enlisted in the war. Howells claims O'Brien "had risen to be an officer in the swift process of the first days of it" (73).

Howells recounts that O'Brien had shot and killed a man at camp, and the outcome or his punishment was uncertain. O'Brien was cleared of wrong-doing on that account. O'Brien would die of lockjaw from a battle injury (73).

Introduced to Howells by Stedman, Howells states that the Stoddards were in "the glow of their early fame as poets" (72). He also mentions that "they knew about my poor beginnings and were very, very good to me" (72).

Of his friendship with the Stoddards, Howells says "But what I relished most was the long talk I had with them both about authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some wholly irreverent joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatsoever. Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it, from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me she has failed of the recognition her work merits, and which will be hers when Time begins to look about him for work worth remembering" (72-73).

Of Mrs. Stoddard's work, Howells continues, "Her tales and novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of literature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like no other, and a personality disdainful of literary environment" (73).

Howells also states "In a time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Browning, she never would write like anyone but herself" (73).

Howells fondly recalls visiting the couple and mentions that they had an appreciation for all literature, including his own (73).

Howells says "I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it" (73).