Silas Lapham's long-lasting paint, made with minerals found on his family's farm in Vermont, has helped make him a millionaire-as has hard work, ambition, and tough business sense. Now that he's reached late middle age, he's a success. A newspaper is writing him up in its "Solid Men of Boston" series, his family goes to seaside resorts in the summer, the scion of the aristocratic Covey family has joined his firm, his daughters have made inroads into 1880s society, and he's even having a lavish house built in the newly fashionable Back Bay.
But it's all too good to last. Soon the Laphams must deal with long-simmering temptations that exist because of a ruthless decision made when his company was getting off the ground. Will they avoid a fall?
In 1885, when The Rise of Silas Lapham was published, William Dean Howells was in the middle of his own career. The novel remains his best-known work, enduring in no small part because of its portrayal of the self-made man and the problems that success and competition bring.
Perfect for readers who enjoy masterful explorations of American ambition and the complexities of social mobility during the Gilded Age. Howells' keen psychological insight and realistic portrayal of a self-made man's struggles with wealth, family, and moral choices make this a timeless classic that resonates as powerfully today as it did over a century ago.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)