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The Amazon Store at MillionDollarPetPix.com ( In association with Amazon.com )The Rise of Silas Lapham (Penguin Classics) List Price: $15.00 Amazon.com's Price: $10.20 You Save: $4.80 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 813.4 EAN: 9780140390308 ISBN: 0140390308 Label: Penguin Classics Manufacturer: Penguin Classics Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 400 Publication Date: April 28, 1983 Publisher: Penguin Classics Studio: Penguin Classics Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Product Description: William Dean Howells' richly humorous characterization of a self-made millionaire in Boston society provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age. After establishing a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston, where they awkwardly attempt to break into Brahmin society. Silas, greedy for wealth as well as prestige, brings his company to the brink of bankruptcy, and the family is forced to return to Vermont, financially ruined but morally renewed. As Kermit Vanderbilt points out in his introduction, 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. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Good Overall ExperienceThe merchandise arrived timely and the overall experience was a good one. Rating: - One of his bestYou might be able to take a man of humble beginnings and make him a rich man, but can he ever cross the line into Society? Silas Lapham becomes rich from paint that he sells, but fails totally in his attempt to become an accepted member of the upper class. The book also concerns a misunderstood love interest by one of Lapham's daughters: the young man is actually in love with his other daughter. Lapham's business fails at the end, but he doesn't sacrifice his integrity. Which is why it is only the ... Read More Rating: - Should be called "The Rise and Fall of Silas Lapham"This book blew my mind! I found it absolutely engaging and the character of Silas Lapham was endearing to the point of surprise. This book says a lot about a class conscious America and even more about how "mom and pop" capitalism gets pushed aside to make way for impersonal mega corporations. Silas Lapham is a good-hearted, yet rugged individualist who pulled himself up by the bootstraps to make a giant fortune. Once he succeeds however, there is a whole group of people at the top of the ladder ... Read More Rating: - A perfectly symmetrical novel -- literally.To the page, this book is symmetrical in its structure. It opens with a public confession (to a reporter) and ends with a private one (to a priest). In the exact center comes Lapham's moment of realization when he is drunk at a party. There is more to the structure, but that should be enough to get you going. A reviewer below calls Lapham a 'mogul with a conscience' which is accurate. The true core of this book is the way Howells carefully built it, though. Considering it comes from an age ... Read More Rating: - Mogul with a conscienceWilliam Dean Howells's "The Rise of Silas Lapham" is one of the earliest American novels about a businessman, and that qualification alone makes it a literary curiosity, but what is most remarkable about it is what its title character is not, rather than what he is. Silas Lapham is not a ruthless, villainously greedy tycoon who bullies his employees and relishes destroying the careers of his competitors and enemies, but a conscientious, likeable man to whom misfortune happens because of his gullibility ... Read More 
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