What to read after How To Tell a Story and Others?

How to Tell a Story and Other Essays is a useful book even if it isn't the funniest thing ever - and the title essay really is chock-full of good, solid advice for budding writers. In the literary line, "In Defence of Harriet Shelley" is a lengthy demolition of Prof. Edward Dowden's 1886 attempt at a biography of English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Dowden laid all the blame for Shelley's contemptible excesses on Shelley's first wife, Harriet (a child bride aged 16). "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" is a rich chortle made richer by the fact that its seemingly hyperbolic charges are all perfectly true. Other selections include "Traveling with a Reformer," "Private History of the 'Jumping Frog' Story," "Mental Telegraphy Again," "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us," and "A Little Note to M. Paul Bourget." Today's readers probably know less about Paul Bourget than they know of the poet Shelley, and care not at all about 19th-century authorial cat fights.