A self-made paint millionaire from Vermont builds a house on the water side of Beacon Street and discovers that Boston's old families will accept his money and not his daughters. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary man in America; he made his hero's crisis a matter of business ethics rather than romance, which few novelists had thought to do. Fifty-three plates, from Munch's Despair to Winslow Homer's Village by the Sea, give the novel's Boston its wider weather of water, shore, and village life.
