The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). rn VOLUME XVII. Later National Literature, Part II.
XI. The Later Novel: Howells§ 21. Travels and Memoirs
Reminiscences and travels assume a still larger place in his later work. After A Boy’s Town came My Literary Passions (1895), and then Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), of accounts of the classic age of Boston and Cambridge easily the best. He revisited Europe and left records in London Films (1905), Certain Delightful English Towns (1906), Roman Holidays (1908), Seven English Cities (1909), Familiar Spanish Travels (1908), in which he occasionally drew his matter out thin but in which he was never for a page dull, or untruthful, or sour, after the ancient habit of travellers. My Mark Twain (1910) is incomparably the finest of all the interpretations of Howells’s great friend, while Years of My Youth (1916), written when the author was nearly eighty, is the work of a master whom age had made wise and left strong. In 1909 he was chosen president of the American Academy, and six years later he received the National Institute’s gold medal “for distinguished work in fiction.” He died 11 May, 1920.