SOURCE: "Walden on Halsted Street: Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House," in The Centennial Review, Vol. 23, 1979, pp. 185-207.

In the following essay, Hurt examines Twenty Years at Hull-House as a work of literary self-examination.

I

It may seem somewhat wrong-headed to attempt to examine Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House as a work of art, since a major theme of the book is a condemnation of art for its tendency to numb us to living reality. Addams quotes William Dean Howells approvingly—"Mr. Howells has said that we are all so besotted with our novel reading that we have lost the power of seeing certain aspects of life with any sense of reality because we are continually looking for the possible romance"¹—and an early turning point in the book is her horrified realization that her romantic reading has so aestheticized her that she has watched a gory...