The Vacation of the Kelwyns, “The Critical Bookstore,” and Henry James’s “Right of Leaning Back”

By 1905 William Dean Howells had already become a kind of historical artifact in American literary circles, a comic abstraction of his own realism wars and an estranged parent to the very generation of young writers that he continued to sponsor and review. Amid what would seem to be a series of almost desperate attempts to reimagine and reinvent his artistic persona, and under the tremendous pressure of mounting family and personal tragedies (his wife Elinor and dear friend Samuel Clemens would both die in 1910), Howells produced a series of texts that would chronicle not only his flagging faith in his own realism war but also in the public office of literature.