William Dean Howells: Novels 1886-1888 (LOA #44): The Minister's Charge / April Hopes / Annie Kilburn

William Dean Howells was the foremost champion of realism in late-nineteenth-century American fiction. The three novels in this Library of America volume perceptively and often satirically examine the conflict between Christian ideals and commercial success, the contrast between a society’s rituals of courtship and the realities of love, and the way in which a community’s democratic aspirations are contradicted by its class divisions.

In The Minister’s Charge (1886), Lemuel Barker leaves his...