3Nicknamed the "Dean of American Letters," William Dean Howells was a remarkable literary figure. A novelist, critic, and playwright, he forged friendships with luminaries such as Mark Twain, Henry James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Though Howells is best known for his East Coast novels The Rise of Silas Lampham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, he never forgot his Ohio roots. In Stories of Ohio, Howells recounts the history of the state through short vignettes--from the Native burial grounds of the Serpent Mound, to the first European settlers on the frontier, to the Civil War generals and presidents the state birthed in the late nineteenth century.