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قراءة كتاب Years of My Youth
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
YEARS OF MY YOUTH
BY
W. D. HOWELLS
WITH INTRODUCTION AND ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN EXPRESSLY
FOR THIS BOOK BY CLIFTON JOHNSON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Years of My Youth
Copyright, 1916, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published October, 1917
K-R
ILLUSTRATIONS
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The waterside at Martin’s Ferry |
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The Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia |
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Hamilton, Ohio, the “Boy’s Town” of Mr. Howells’s youth |
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The Miami Canal at Hamilton |
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The now abandoned canal at Dayton as it appears on the borders of the city |
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The Little Miami River at Eureka Mills, twelve miles east of Dayton |
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Overlooking the island which the Howells family cultivated |
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The vicinity where Mr. Howells lived his “Year in a Log Cabin” |
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One of the last log houses to survive in the vicinity of Jefferson |
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The four-story office erected by Mr. Howells’s father |
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The Ohio State House at Columbus viewed from High Street |
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The State House yard on the State Street side |
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Old-time dwellings on one of the Columbus streets that Mr. Howells used to frequent |
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The Medical College at Columbus |
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The quaint doorway of the Medical College through which Mr. Howells passed daily while he roomed in the building |
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Looking into the State House grounds toward the broad flight of steps before the west front of the building |
PREFACE BY THE ILLUSTRATOR
WHENEVER I visit the region of a famous man’s youth I have the feeling that I ought to discover there some clue to the secret of his greatness; for I cannot help fancying that the environment must have molded him and been an essential element in the development of his individuality and power. It was with such expectations that I recently went to Ohio, just as spring was verging into summer, to see the land where Mr. Howells spent the years of which he has made so frank and appealing a record in this volume. In the middle of the last century the State retained much of the crude primitiveness of the frontier, and I wondered what stimulus this could have offered in creating a genius so broad in his views and so sensitive to impressions, and in whose expression there is such fine imagination, humor, sympathy, and wisdom.
I began my journey in Mr. Howells’s native State where he began his life’s journey eighty years ago, at Martin’s Ferry. The place is two miles up the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia, on the western bank of the stream. By the water-side are big, ugly factories belching smoke and steam, and in their vicinity are railroad tracks, cinders, and other litter, and dingy, ramshackle buildings, among which are numerous forlorn little dwellings and occasional saloons. A sort of careless prosperity is in evidence, but not much of the charm of neatness, or concern for appearances. The rest of the town overspreads the steep slopes that border the river, and pushes back into the nooks among the adjacent upheaval of big hills. It is rather chaotic, but improves in quality the farther it recedes from the smoke and din of the manufacturing strip along the river.
The small brick Howells house stood close to the stream, where grime and squalor most abound at present. However, the railroad was not there then, and Martin’s Ferry was a village that had in some respects real rural attraction.
During the period of about twenty-five years which this book covers the Howells family lived in seven different places, many of them widely separated, but all within the confines of Ohio; and they seldom stayed long in any town without occupying more than one residence. Naturally, there have been marked changes in the aspect of most of the places where they dwelt. Perhaps Jefferson has changed least. In the old days it