Author Archives
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Analysis of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra
John O’Hara derived the title of his first novel from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppey, which features Death glibly describing the fate of a man who had tried to elude her: “I was astonished to see him in Baghdad,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife
This novel diverts the saga started in Love Medicine with the Morriseys, Lamartines, and Kashpaws by introducing new families and therefore, different realities and conflicts. For the difficulties resulting from assimilation conflicts and annihilation present in Erdrich’s earlier novels, Erdrich… Read More ›
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Analysis of William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn (1888)
Often overshadowed by The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn (1888) is an important novel for understanding Howells’s development as a novelist and a social critic. More than 100… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John
In this autobiographical bildungsroman set in the colonial Antigua of Jamaica Kincaid’s own childhood, adolescence is figured as loss: loss of the protagonist’s irreplaceable bond with her mother, loss of friends that she outgrows, and finally loss of home, as,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose
Angle of Repose, for which Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, was written from 1968 to 1970, a turbulent period in U.S. history. Without directly discussing the Vietnam War, the cause for much of the turbulence, Stegner addresses… Read More ›
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Analysis of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy
Literary naturalists, such as Theodore Dreiser, often depicted characters in urban, working-class settings. A scathing indictment of the American success myth, An American Tragedy describes two unequal Americas in unceasing struggle. The poor suffer, while the rich insist “how difficult… Read More ›
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Analysis of Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son
A New York Times 2001 Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001, American Son presents a grim view of immigrant status and violence in Southern California in the 1990s. This coming-of-age novel tells… Read More ›
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Analysis of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
Ellis’s first-person account of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street type who kills between binges of good grooming, was a scandal even before its publication because its first contracted publisher refused to print it. Its horrific, some would say pornographic, depiction… Read More ›
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Analysis of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
Although it was written first, Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral is chronologically the second novel in his American Trilogy about postwar America, beginning with I Married a Communist (1998) and ending with The Human Stain (2000). Covering the period… Read More ›
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Analysis of Norman Mailer’s An American Dream
When Norman Mailer released his serialized novel An American Dream in 1965, critics either praised him for his work or dismissed the novel as a failure. In this controversial novel, Mailer tells the story of Stephen Richards Rojack, a former… Read More ›
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Analysis of Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat
Bapsi Sidhwa, a Parsee (Zoroastrian) writer of Pakistani descent, was born in Karachi, then part of pre-partition India, and all her early fiction is set in Pakistan or India. She immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, and An… Read More ›
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Analysis of Joyce Carol Oates’s American Appetites
Before the film American Beauty, before Columbine, even before the Menendez brothers or JonBenet Ramsey became symbols of American suburban culture, Joyce Carol Oates had, in her fluid style, already shown the “dark side” of suburbia in American Appetites. Indeed,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart
Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, first published in 1943 and then in 1946, details the memories and experiences of a young immigrant from the Philippines. Bulosan’s travel narrative recounts the difficulties of his childhood in provincial Philippines, the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel focuses on Josef (Joe) Kavalier and Sammy Clay (né Klayman), two artistically gifted cousins who create the masked comic-book hero, The Escapist, modeled on Superman, in New York City just before, during, and after World… Read More ›
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Analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses
The publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 vaulted Cormac McCarthy into the spotlight of the American literary mainstream. Though his five previous novels had garnered consistently positive reviews and a number of awards, McCarthy had endured poor sales… Read More ›
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Analysis of All the King’s Men Robert Penn Warren (1946)
America’s first poet laureate, Robert Penn Warren, was best known during his life as a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. However, his 1946 novel, All the King’s Men, has become his most recognized work since his death in 1987. The novel won… Read More ›
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Analysis of Milton Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body
Almost every scholar of Asian American literature has acknowledged the brilliance of Milton Murayama’s first novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, and its notable contribution to local Hawaiian and Asian American literature. When All I Asking for Is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams
Although this book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, Booth Tarkington’s works remain on very few academic lists today. However, Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis in 1869, was quite popular during his lifetime. The Princeton-educated author lived more similarly to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive
A central but underappreciated figure in the emergence of American national literature, Royall Tyler (1757–1826) is probably best known for his nationalistic play The Contrast (1787), a fairly conventional comedy of manners distinguishing Yankee virtue from English vice. From a… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence continues to invite a wide range of analyses. The novel examines the triangle between Ellen Olenska, her cousin May Welland, and May’s husband, Newland Archer, against the background of upper-class society in 1870s New… Read More ›
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