Book excerpt: In this series, William Dean Howells delightfully describes the early years of his life, in the "Boy's Town" of Ohio, the state where he was born and raised. These stories remain as a vivid autobiographical records and colorful images of a life in the mid-nineteenth century American town. Extract: "If there was any fellow in the Boy's Town fifty years ago who had a good reason to run off it was Pony Baker. Pony was not his real name; it was what the boys called him, because there were so many fellows who had to be told apart, as Big Joe and Little Joe, and Big John and Little John, and Big Bill and Little Bill, that they got tired of telling boys apart that way; and after one of the boys called him Pony Baker, so that you could know him from his cousin Frank Baker, nobody ever called him anything else." William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author, literary critic, and playwright. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day", and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria. Howells is known to be the father of American realism, and a denouncer of the sentimental novel. He was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His stories of Boston upper crust life set in the 1850s are highly regarded among scholars of American fiction.