Through the Eye of the Needle

Through the Eye of the Needle is a Utopian novel William Dean Howells. Howells casts this book in the form of an epistolary novel – a form favoured by some other Utopian and dystopian writers. Aristides Homos, Howells's Altrurian protagonist, writes a series of letters home to his friend Cyril. Homos is now located in the densely urban environment of New York City, where he confronts the contrasts between America c. 1900 and his own pastoral and agrarian Utopianism in their most extreme forms. The dramatic centre of the book is the love affair between Homos and Evelith Strange, a wealthy widow of the American plutocracy.