I am frantically looking for the name of the article, story, book that WD Howells wrote on bureauracracy that WD Howells wrote. It was about a coach or stagecoach on which people kept climbing on and falling off and everyone was trying to get to the top of the coach. This influenced my conceptions strongly and I would like to pass it on to others but have forgotten the name.
Margaret Nadey RN,RCNP,CON,CNM,CLNC,SSANE,VNI
W. D. Howells Society 
This sounds fascinating. I am sorry not to have any information to give to you but I would be very interested in sharing any information that might come to you from others in our William Dean Howells Society. What a deeply thoughtful, perceptive and future-sensitive man he was! I did my MA thesis on WDH’s attention to women’s dilemma (“New Woman vs. True Woman”) in that time period, as reflected in his three major 1880s novels (A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, and in the process, as I read just about everything I could find by him or about him, I came to feel an almost family connection with him, and a respect that just grew and grew, for the depth and width of his thinking, plus his personal modesty and his generally kind outlook toward humanity. This little stagecoach story, with its underlying theme of who gets to the top, seems so “Him”, to me! I hope you find it. — Maureen D. McGowan