The Rise of Silas Lapham
A paint manufacturer from Vermont moves his family to Boston and discovers that money does not buy the manners he thought it would. Howells wrote the novel as a deliberate attempt to treat American business life with the same seriousness European novels gave to inheritance and class.
The famous scene is a dinner party at which Lapham, trying to be honest, says the wrong thing to the wrong people. Howells is not a flashy writer, and the book's quietness is the point: it asks whether a decent man can succeed in business without becoming someone he would not employ.
Public-domain status
First published in 1885. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; William Dean Howells died in 1920, so this work has been free to republish there since 1991.
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