The Hunger

Caleb Crain’s review of William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life in The New Republic is juicy: wasting women, wickedness, and flesh. Lots of it. (At least they didn’t have trans fats in the 19th century.) Of one of Howells’s characters Crain writes:

Bartley Hubbard was fat the way Tony Soprano is fat. He thrived where nicer people couldn’t bear to. And so, it seems, did Howells. He made a comfortable living as an intellectual and literary artist in the Gilded Age, the most corrupt era in American history before our own, when Reconstruction was sabotaged, monopolies flourished, the spirit of workers was broken, innocent radicals were hanged, and elected officials expected kickbacks and lied fluently to start war. In a family of delicate women, Howells’s healthy appetite must have made him feel a bit like Boss Tweed. Or, perhaps, Ugolino.