Set during the Civil War and Reconstruction and composed of seven stories (five of which had been published previously in the Saturday Evening Post and one in Scribner’s), William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished has been viewed as both a novel and… Read More ›
At the height of World War II, William Faulkner wrote a pair of compelling stories exploring the viability and importance of America as a nation. Though the United States as a whole was his theme in these two wartime stories,… Read More ›
When it appeared in the American Mercury in March 1931, the editor, H. L. Mencken, prevailed on William Faulkner to make changes in “That Evening Sun” (then entitled “That Evening Sun Go Down”) to make it more palatable to the… Read More ›
At the height of World War II, William Faulkner wrote a pair of compelling stories exploring the viability and importance of America as a nation. Though the United States as a whole was his theme in these two wartime stories,… Read More ›
The third of seven stories composing William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942), “Pantaloon in Black” is the tragic and poignant story of Rider, a black sawmill worker who is made a widower when his young bride, Mannie, dies only six… Read More ›
Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner’s 12th novel, is generally ranked as one of his greatest—not least because it doubles as a unique collection of short stories. Most of these stories had been published separately between 1935 and 1942, in such… Read More ›
Initially published in Forum on April 30, 1930, and collected in These Thirteen in 1931, “A Rose for Emily” remains one of William Faulkner’s most read, most anthologized, and most significant stories. From every imaginable perspective, critics have scrutinized the… Read More ›
William Faulkner (1897-1962) has been credited with having the imagination to see, before other serious writers saw, the tremendous potential for drama, pathos, and sophisticated humor in the history and people of the South. In using this material and, in… Read More ›
As part of the modernist imperative to “make it new,” writers of the 1920s and 1930s consistently wreaked havoc with existing genre conventions. “Poems” no longer rhymed and scanned predictably; essays and reviews had a subjective, even idiosyncratic, slant; plays… Read More ›
One of the most celebrated novels by Heinrich Böll (1917–85), Billiards at Half Past Nine appeared in 1959, the same year as The Tin Drum by Günter Grass and Speculations about Jacob by Uwe Johnson, two other seminal works of German… Read More ›
Washington Irving’s famous opening to this story, which first appeared in The Sketch Book in 1820, evokes the dreamlike, almost mystical quality of the Hudson River Valley. It also takes the reader to Sleepy Hollow, where almost anything might have… Read More ›
A Brief Life is the first major novel by Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–94), although the work is fourth in chronological order when placed with his related novels. It marks a watershed in the Uruguay-born Onetti’s career as well as in… Read More ›
Appearing in Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, “Rip Van Winkle” was an immediate popular success. In retrospect, it helped refute the infamous question posed by the British critic Sydney Smith: “Who, in the four corners of… Read More ›
Appearing in Story magazine and traditionally considered Zora Neale Hurston’s most accomplished story, “The Gilded Six-Bits” had a favorable reception that helped call Hurston to the attention of critics and publishers and resulted in the publication of her first novel,… Read More ›
During the 1940s and 1950s, a new literary generation provided something of a transition between the southern renaissance and the post–southern renaissance period. The Pulitzer Prize–winning fictionist Peter Taylor (1917–94) proves a good example of this transitional group in terms… Read More ›
In an age of plastic surgery, stomach stapling, and laser treatments, American culture has placed its focus not on only hiding flaws but erasing them entirely in the quest for perfection. “Intervention,” by Jill McCorkle, was first published in Ploughshares… Read More ›
The modernism movement has many credos: Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” and Virginia Woolf’s assertion that sometime around December 1910 “human character changed” are but two of the most famous. It is important to remember that modernism is… Read More ›
The myth about Sherwood Anderson—that in the middle of a successful advertising career he repudiated the moneymaking ethics and the regimentation of business in order to realize himself as a writer—has become part of our literary tradition, an ironic reversal… Read More ›
Through its 12 stories, the first of which is Damballah, traces the earliest tales of the characters who eventually play roles in the so-called Homewood Trilogy; some are even named after Wideman’s family members. On one level, the book is a… Read More ›
When William Faulkner (1897-1962) accepted the Nobel Prize in December, 1950, he made a speech that has become a justly famous statement of his perception of the modern world and of his particular place in it. In the address, Faulkner speaks… Read More ›
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