[Gutenberg 7083] • Venetian Life

In 1869 W. D. Howells, in reward for having written a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, was given the job of consul in Venice.

For a young nineteenth-century American who had left school when he was nine to earn a living, the hardest part of his sinecure was that he had almost nothing to do. "I dreaded the easily formed habit of receiving a salary for no service performed," he wrote. "I reminded myself that, soon or late, I must go back to the old fashion of earning money, and that it had better be sooner than later."

*Venetian Life* flows from the enchantment, the magical improbability, of the years Howell spent in that magnificent city dining with the rich, mingling with the humble, and reporting it all with a uniquely American wit and curiosity.