Author Archives
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Analysis of Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle
Tell Me a Riddle, the title Novella of Tillie Olsen’s 1961 collection, details the state of the relationship of an elderly married couple who, in their youth, emigrated from Russia. Now that their children are grown, husband and wife disagree… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anne Tyler’s Teenage Wasteland
By the time Anne Tyler published “Teenage Wasteland” late in 1983, the heyday of the hippie counterculture was more than a decade in the past. Initially it seems that in this grim story she steps back in time to set… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Cheever’s The Swimmer
Joh Cheever’s account of Neddy Merrill, a middleaged man who traverses the expanse of an upscale suburban county by swimming a sequence of pools, is a highly ironic inversion of a conventional elegiac theme, the athlete dying young. His journey… Read More ›
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Analysis of Junot Díaz’s The Sun, the Moon, the Stars
The first-person narrator and protagonist Yunior, in the comic tale of infidelity “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” is someone with whom we could easily see Junot Díaz himself growing up. He is a young Latin American man whose street… Read More ›
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Analysis of Raymond Carver’s The Student’s Wife
Published in his first major short story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? “The Student’s Wife” marks Raymond Carver’s first use of insomnia, a plot device and theme he returned to in later stories. As Ernest Fontana notes, insomnia… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alice Walker’s Strong Horse Tea
“Strong Horse Tea,” a woman oppressed by racism, classism, and ignorance looks to white culture for magical cures while rejecting the home remedies of her community. Rannie Toomer, a mother whose baby, Snooks, is dying of double pneumonia and whooping… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sherwood Anderson’s The Strength of God
As many of the stories in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio do, “The Strength of God” illustrates Anderson’s understanding of the grotesque as a character’s limited or distorted perspective of reality. As the old man observes in the opening story titled… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour
Originally entitled “The Dream of an Hour” when it was first published in Vogue (December 1894), “The Story of an Hour” has since become one of Kate Chopin’s most frequently anthologized stories. Among her shortest and most daring works, “Story”… Read More ›
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Analysis of Peter Taylor’s A Spinster’s Tale
In terms of both his life and his work, Peter Taylor (1917–1994) proves a good representative of the literary generation that provided a transition between the southern renaissance and the post–southern renaissance period. Born into an extended political clan with… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s The Spark
One of Edith Wharton’s many stories of New York, The Spark was published with the subtitle The ’Sixties as the third of four volumes in a boxed set, Old New York, in 1924. This novella is the story of Hayley… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s Souls Belated
Edith Wharton’s “Souls Belated” centers on Lydia Tillotson, a divorced woman, who travels with Ralph Gannett, a successful writer, but refuses to marry him so that she can maintain her self-esteem. McDowell detects the implied contradictory nature of marriage as… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues
“Sonny’s Blues” is a first-person account by an AfricanAmerican schoolteacher trying to come to terms with his younger brother, Sonny, a jazz musician and sometime heroin addict. Some of James Baldwin’s thematic preoccupations can be ascertained by noting the subtle… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s Soldier’s Home
Originally published in the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers in 1925, then reprinted in In Our Time that same year, “Soldier’s Home” is a classic early Ernest Hemingway story for at least three reasons. First, the author powerfully evokes the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was first published in Esquire in August 1936 and is one of Ernest Hemingway’s most frequently anthologized short stories. It opens with the protagonist, Harry, a washed-up writer who has gone to Africa with his wife,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ann Beattie’s The Snow
Originally published in Vanity Fair in 1983 and collected in Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories in 1986, Ann Beattie’s “The Snow” is about remembering and forgetting, and about the art of storytelling itself. Only three pages long and… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Steinbeck’s The Snake
In the 1951 essay “About Ed Ricketts,” published as part of The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck records his recollection of the composition of his short story “The Snake” and identifies the occurrence as an actual event… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ernest J. Gaines’s The Sky Is Gray
This story, which initially appeared in Ernest J. Gaines’s collection entitled Bloodlines, has become a classic contemporary bildungsoman. Powerfully told with a convincing use of African-American dialect and dialogue, the story features nine-year-old James and the lessons he learns from… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
In the story by Ernest Hemingway, the setting is Africa, where Margot and Francis Macomber have hired the English guide Robert Wilson to take them on a big-game hunt. The Macomber marriage is on shaky ground, but “Margot was too… Read More ›
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Analysis of Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh
The name Shiloh customarily refers to the civil war battle near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, where nearly 24,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were wounded or killed on April 6 and April 7, 1862. In Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1982 story, however, the… Read More ›
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Analysis of William Faulkner’s Shall Not Perish
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 ›
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