Stories of Ohio

This unsung classic of American literature helps shed light on both Ohio and the career of a writer known as the “Dean of American Letters.”

With a new introduction by Anne Trubek

A novelist, critic, and playwright, William Dean Howells was friends with such luminaries as Mark Twain, Henry James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Though he’s best known for his East Coast novels like The Rise of Silas Lampham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells never forgot his roots in Ohio. And in Stories of Ohio, he offers a series of short vignettes that chronicle the state’s history, including:

• the Native burial grounds of the Serpent Mound
• the first European settlers on the frontier
• Ohio’s role in the War of 1812
• the Civil War generals and presidents the state birthed in the late nineteenth century.

Though this history primarily focuses on life in Ohio before the nineteenth century, it will help today’s reader see the state in a brand-new light.

“If these Stories distill into two hundred pages what Ohio was, they also suggest what Ohio could have been if compassion and a desire for intercultural exchange had superseded conquest as a motivating force on the frontier.” —James Bruggeman at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal