The Minister's Charge (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

This 1886 novel introduces Howells's concept—derived from Tolstoy—of moral complicity, which would play a large part in his fiction from this point on.  A poor farmer, Lemuel Barker, comes to Boston with dreams of becoming a poet.  Instead, his naïveté leaves him an easy mark, and he is soon destitute.  A minister, Sewell, is forced to consider his own complicity in Barker's fate . . . and by extension that of all his less-fortunate fellows.