Author Archives
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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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Analysis of John Updike’s Separating
First published in the New Yorker in 1975 and included in Prize Stories 1976: The O. Henry Awards, “Separating” was incorporated with other stories featuring Joan and Richard Maple in Too Far to Go (1979), a short story cycle chronicling… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
As a 20th-century comic writer, James Thurber had few peers. Not only is “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” considered his best story, but the term Walter Mitty also has entered the language as a metaphor for an ordinary man… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Saunders’s Sea Oak
The ghost story “Sea Oak” presents George Saunders at his most biting and also most tender. The story takes place in a housing development, Sea Oak, and centers around the unnamed narrator, his sister and cousin (Min and Jade, respectively),… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Hurst’s The Scarlet Ibis
The only work of James Hurst’s to gain widespread recognition, The Scarlet Ibis was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1960 and won the Atlantic First award that year. Rising quickly to the status of a classic, this story… Read More ›
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Analysis of Grace Paley’s Samuel
In Grace Paley’s “Samuel,” which appears in the author’s second story collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), issues of racism and motherhood emerge as prominent themes. This story, which mostly takes place on a subway in Paley’s favored… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alice Munro’s Royal Beatings
Alice Munro’s short story “Royal Beatings” explores the world of a depression era family weighted down by poverty and longing in rural Ontario. This coming-of-age story focuses on the central character, Rose; her father; her stepmother, Flo; and her half… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alice Walker’s Roselily
From Alice Walker’s collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, “Roselily” depicts a young black woman unsure whether she is in love and worried that she might be inviting trouble. Her thoughts occur during her marriage to an… Read More ›
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Analysis of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily
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 ›
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