Years of My Youth

Before he was the dean of American letters, he was a printer's boy in Ohio. William Dean Howells remembers the villages and river towns of his upbringing: the smell of ink, the books he ate whole, the ague and the ambition, the long apprenticeship of a boy who meant to be a writer and had no idea how. You will discover a quiet, exact, deeply felt memoir from the man who shaped American realism. The making of a writer, told without vanity. Press play and go back with him.