In that book, Howells relates chiefly to his activities as a business-man author. Without any family or other outside pecuniary assistance, lacking even a formal college education, he had become such a successful man-of-letters business man that he reared his family in comfort, owning city property as well as two summer estates in Maine, at Kittery Point and York Harbor.

It's an autobiographical book. It contains 12 chapters. Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer wishes to offer a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that they have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to any central motive. Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like this relation and this allegiance.

William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837-May 11, 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.