When Kate Chopin (1850–1904 began to publish, local-color writing, which came into being after the Civil War and crested during the 1880’s, had already been established. Bret Harte and Mark Twain had created a special ambience for their fiction in the… Read More ›
In a literary period that witnessed the exhaustion of literature, wholesale formal experimentation, a general distrust of language, the death of the novel, and the blurring of the lines separating fiction and play, mainstream art and the avantgarde, John Cheever… Read More ›
Many people who have never read a single word of Raymond Chandler’s (1888–1959) recognize the name of his fictional hero Philip Marlowe. This recognition results in part from the wide exposure and frequent dilution Chandler’s work has received in media… Read More ›
Willa Cather (1873—1947) was a prolific American novelist noted for her portrayals of the settlers and frontier life on the American plains. She once said in an interview that the Nebraska landscape was “the happiness and the curse” of her… Read More ›
The pattern of Truman Capote’s 1(924 – 1984) career suggests a divided allegiance to two different, even opposing literary forms—objective realism and romance. Capote’s earliest fiction belongs primarily to the imagination of romance. It is intense, wondrously evocative, subjective; in place… Read More ›
Although George Washington Cable’s (1844 – 1925) reputation rests primarily on one collection of short stories and two pieces of longer fiction, his total output includes twenty-two books. For an understanding of Cable as a writer of fiction, one should… Read More ›
Octavia E. Butler presented a version of humanity as a congenitally flawed species, possibly doomed to destroy itself because it is both intelligent and hierarchical. In this sense, her work does not follow the lead of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series… Read More ›
