Product Description

William Dean Howells' richly humorous characterization of a self-made millionaire in Boston society provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age. After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston, where they awkwardly attempt to break into Brahmin society. Silas, greedy for wealth as well as prestige, brings his company to the brink of bankruptcy, and the family is forced to return to Vermont, financially ruined but morally renewed. As Kermit Vanderbilt points out in his introduction, the novel focuses on important themes in the American literary tradition: the efficacy of self-help and determination, the ambiguous benefits of social and economic progress, and the continual contradiction between urban and pastoral values.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #536275 in Books
• Published on: 1983-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Customer Reviews

What does it profit a man to gain the world ?
Silas Lapham is a self-made man who despite having a fourtune is unable to break into the upper-crust of Society. This story chronicals how Silas and the entire Lapham family become the Beverly Hillbillies for the pre-TV world. In the end the families happiness can only happen by following the old saying of to thine own self be true.

Must read for every "Enron" manager
This is a must read book and provides a glimpse of business morals in the nineteenth century. Read first, Mark Twain's "The Gilded Age" and Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit". Silas' 'rise' is not ironic unless accumulation of wealth is your only value. While his monetary assets may shrink, his family 'prospers' in many ways. Clearly, Howells makes the point that honest work can bridge the gap of old rich and new. Commerce is not inherently bad, but it does ask the question, how far should one go in disclosure and protecting others from their potential investment folly.

"Boston Paint Tycoon Plots to Gatecrash Elite : Loses Shirt"
The photographs of Alfred Stieglitz still look modern and talented today, but it's nearly impossible to imagine how they would have looked to viewers in the 1890s, when they were taken. They were revolutionary, amazing, radically avant-garde. In a similar vein, the first novel about an American industrialist---a novel first printed in 1885---cannot seem so new, so fresh to our 21st century eyes. This theme startles nobody anymore. But in tracing the ups and downs of Silas Lapham, late of a Vermont village, a Civil War veteran, and founder of a fortune in 1870s Boston, Howells produced a highly original novel for his day. Lapham, his plain-spoken wife Persis, and two daughters live in luxury, thanks to the successful paint manufacturing business whose ubiquitous ads disfigured large portions of the New England countryside. Puffed up with success and not averse to considerable bragging, Lapham decides to build a sumptuous mansion on the water side of Beacon Street in the then-new district of Back Bay. At the same time, the Laphams come into contact with a family from the old Boston Brahmin elite, a family whose son falls in love with a Lapham daughter. The reaction of both families to this potential liaison, the love affair itself, and the fate of the Lapham fortune form the subject of this solid novel.

William Dean Howells was and is known as one of the early American "realists", as opposed to the more romantic style that dominated most of 19th century English language literature. Not being a person well-versed in the "accepted wisdom" of literary criticism and history, I can only say that compared to later writers, for example, Crane, Norris, Dreiser, and Sinclair, to be followed later by Anderson and Lewis, I find that Howells' work still retains plenty of the more romantic elements even while he does portray the life and business of a paint tycoon with considerable accuracy and empathy. No snobbish repudiator of nouveaux riches gaucheries, Howells. This book is not a sarcastic look at the "ridiculous efforts of a bourgeois to climb above his station". Lapham may have his faults, but he is essentially a good, likeable man. If you have an interest in Boston history or in knowing what Boston life was like in the 1870s, I believe you will certainly enjoy reading THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM. The story is a little artificial, the language a bit outdated, I felt, though in comparison to the horrors and perversities that throng some modern works, the novel might fill a few winter afternoons with a quiet pleasure. Certain stylistic oddities surprised me, such as the sudden appearance of a narrative "I" after over 200 pages ! Howells has been quite neglected in recent times: for sure, he may not be a Dostoevsky, Balzac, or Faulkner, but don't brush him off.