Other editions of book The Rise OF Silas Lapham

The Rise of Silas Lapham is Howell’s best-known work, and this elegant tale of Boston society and manners is rightly regarded as a subtle classic of its time. Silas Lapham inherits his father’s paint business, from which he makes a great deal of money, and moves his family from rural Vermont to cosmopolitan Boston. Attempting to break into the city’s sophisticated society he becomes bent on the acquisition of both money and social position. Howells contrasts "old" and "new" money, presenting the representatives of both sympathetically and portraying the attempts of the self-made man to break into the world inhabited by those from "established" families with humor and delicacy.

[This is the Audiobook CD Library Edition in vinyl case.] Howells' best-known work and a subtle classic of its time, The Rise of Silas Lapham is an elegant tale of Boston society and manners. After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston in order to improve his social position, the consequences of which are both humorous and tragic. The novel focuses on important themes in the American literary tradition--the efficacy of self-help and determination, the ambiguous benefits of social and economic progress, and the continual contradiction between urban and pastoral values--and provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age.