Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 William Dean Howells and the roots of realist taste
- Chapter 2 The “facts of physical suffering,” the literary intellectual, and The Wings of the Dove
- Chapter 3 The “genuine article”: credit and ethnicity in The Rise of David Levinsky
- Chapter 4 What Nona knows
- Chapter 5 From reality, to materiality, to the real (and back again): the dynamics of distinction on the recent critical scene
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - The “genuine article”: credit and ethnicity in The Rise of David Levinsky
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 William Dean Howells and the roots of realist taste
- Chapter 2 The “facts of physical suffering,” the literary intellectual, and The Wings of the Dove
- Chapter 3 The “genuine article”: credit and ethnicity in The Rise of David Levinsky
- Chapter 4 What Nona knows
- Chapter 5 From reality, to materiality, to the real (and back again): the dynamics of distinction on the recent critical scene
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
“I was never snobbish. I care very little about titles; what I look to is intellectual distinction.”
“Combined with financial success.”
“Why, that is what distinction means.”
George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)Abraham Cahan was born in a Russian shtetl. In New York City, Cahan became best known as the long-time editor of a mass-circulation leftwing Yiddish newspaper, The Daily Forward. He also wrote well-received fiction in English, however, most notably a lengthy realist/naturalist novel called The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). This fascinating, semi-auto-biographical text narrates the immigration of a poor Talmud scholar to the United States, where he finds work in the garment trade and, through a series of brilliant (often unethical) business moves, ultimately becomes a wealthy industrialist. Like virtually all of Cahan's English-language fiction, The Rise of David Levinsky is set in the Jewish ghetto of New York's Lower East Side.
William Dean Howells praised Cahan's fiction in his columns and used his book-trade connections to help promulgate it, just as the powerful editor had done (albeit to a much greater extent, of course) with Henry James. Because Cahan might even be seen, at least in this sense, as one of Howells's many protégés, including a chapter on Cahan's literary realism in a book that also treats Howells perhaps needs no further justification.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001