Title:  The Landlord at Lions Head, Complete

Author:  William Dean Howells

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

Release Date:  November, 2003 [Etext #4645] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 20, 2002]

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THE LANDLORD AT LION’S HEAD

By William Dean Howells

Part I.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

In those dim recesses of the consciousness where things have their beginning, if ever things have a beginning, I suppose the origin of this novel may be traced to a fact of a fortnight’s sojourn on the western shore of lake Champlain in the summer of 1891.  Across the water in the State of Vermont I had constantly before my eyes a majestic mountain form which the earlier French pioneers had named “Le Lion Couchant,” but which their plainer-minded Yankee successors preferred to call “The Camel’s Hump.”  It really looked like a sleeping lion; the head was especially definite; and when, in the course of some ten years, I found the scheme for a story about a summer hotel which I had long meant to write, this image suggested the name of ‘The Landlord at Lion’s Head.’  I gave the title to my unwritten novel at once and never wished to change it, but rejoiced in the certainty that, whatever the novel turned out to be, the title could not be better.

I began to write the story four years later, when we were settled for the winter in our flat on Central Park, and as I was a year in doing it, with other things, I must have taken the unfinished manuscript to and from Magnolia, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, Long Island, where I spent the following summer.  It was first serialized in Harper’s Weekly and in the London Illustrated News, as well as in an Australian newspaper—­I forget which one; and it was published as a completed book in 1896.