Which novelist wrote 'The Bostonians'?
The Bostonians vowed that he would rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read the book. The letter in which Twain wrote this remark also contains invectives against the works of George Eliot and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Albert Bigelow Paine wrote in his annotation, "It is as easy to understand Mark Twain's enjoyment of Indian Summer as his revolt against Daniel Deronda and The Bostonians. He cared little for writing that did not convey its purpose in the simplest and most direct terms." Rebecca West described the book, in her biography of Henry James, as "a foolish song set to a good
The Bostonians hangers-on. James shows remarkable ability to create a broad cross-section of American society, which helps refute the charge that he could only handle small, closed-off bits of life. The title refers, not to the people of Boston in general, but to the two characters Olive and Verena, "as they appeared to the mind of Ransom, the southerner, and outsider, looking at them from New York." "The Bostonians" was not well received by contemporary critics, especially on the western side of the Atlantic. James himself once wrote an observation that "The Bostonians" had never, "even to my much-disciplined patience, received any