"Years of My Youth" was authored by William Dean Howells, an American realist novelist, literary critic, and playwright, nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters". The book is historical and the first part of the book read thus "It is hard to know the child's own earliest recollections from the things it has been told of itself by those with whom its life began. They remember for it the past which it afterward seems to remember for itself; the wavering outline of its nature is shadowed against the background of family, and from this it imagines an individual existence which has not yet begun. The events then have the quality of things dreamt, not lived, and they remain of that impalpable and elusive quality in all the after years..."