Short Stories and Essays (from Literature and Life) — Edition Insights

Winter Scenes and Human Comedy

The opening essay, 'Worries of a Winter Walk,' establishes Howells’s method: a seemingly simple stroll becomes a series of encounters that reveal social and economic disparities. The bitter cold drives everyone indoors except the very poor, and the narrator’s attention is caught by a tiny girl carrying a pail 'with both of her little mittened hands.' This image, disproportionate and humorous, leads to a meditation on the 'human comedy' that burdens his consciousness. Howells does not moralize; instead, he lets the scene speak, noting the frozen butchers’ windows and the 'hideous stalactites' of meat. The walk becomes a microcosm of urban life, where even the weather seems to conspire in the drama of survival.

Summer Resorts and the Curse of Choice

In 'The Problem of the Summer,' Howells turns to the seasonal migration of city dwellers. He recounts an extreme case of a family that spends April, May, and June searching for a resort combining 'society and solitude, mountain-air and sea-bathing.' Their frantic changes of plan—telegraphing for rooms, changing trains, doubling back—end with a happy accident: they settle in a smaller house and enjoy the summer immensely. Howells wryly suggests that 'chance makes a very good choice for one, as it does in most non-moral things.' The essay is less about vacation planning than about human indecision and the comedy of self-imposed stress. Howells’s tone is affectionate but pointed, and he notes that the summer hotel has improved vastly, 'except the prices.'

The Circus and the Suburbs

'A Circus in the Suburbs' shifts the scene to a traveling show that brings a 'motley life' to the outskirts of the city. Howells describes the procession of wagons, animals, and performers with a reporter’s eye for detail, but his interest is in the audience: the suburban families, the children, the 'hooded women' who emerge from their houses. The circus becomes a lens through which he examines the tension between rural and urban, between the orderly life of the suburbs and the chaotic spectacle of the circus. He notes the 'sawdust in the arena' and the 'wild flowers of the asphalt'—images that recur throughout the collection, linking the natural and the manufactured. The essay is a study in contrasts, where the exotic and the familiar meet under the big top.

From New York into New England

The travel essay 'From New York into New England' traces a journey by train and carriage through the changing landscape. Howells observes the architecture, the people, and the customs of the towns he passes, noting the shift from the 'piebald' city to the more homogeneous villages. He is particularly struck by the persistence of Puritanism in American fiction, a theme he explores in a later essay. The journey is both literal and metaphorical: he moves through space and time, from the modern city to the older, more settled world of New England. His observations are precise—the 'white steeples,' the 'elms,' the 'stone walls'—but he always returns to the human element, the 'faces' and 'voices' that define a place. The essay is a meditation on change and continuity, on what is lost and what remains.

Howells’s essays reward a patient reader who enjoys the texture of daily life rendered with wit and sympathy. The collection moves between city and country, winter and summer, the grand and the trivial, always anchored by a keen eye for detail. Read these pieces as a series of sketches, each one a window into a world that is both specific and universal. The humor is dry, the observations sharp, and the overall effect is one of quiet, humane intelligence.

On winter walks, Howells catches people mid-thought—their solitudes intact, their excuses thin. I found myself lingering over that quiet loneliness, then recalling The Last of the Chiefs: A Story of the Great Sioux War — Text and Context, where the prairie holds the same patient gravity. Different worlds, yet each observer watches someone straining to stay whole against forces they cannot name.