Word: squeams
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Weedy Neurosis. The source of Howells' crippling tameness is more complex than his frequently cited refusal to write about sex (no American could write about sex in those days of rump-hump squeam-ishness). Howells simply could not write, and preferred not to think, about the darker sides of human nature. Much as he admired Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the realities they wrote of were to him merely Russian realities; it would be impossible to write a Russian novel in the U.S., he wrote, because here life took on a more "smiling aspect." Biographer Edwin H. Cady presents evidence that...
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