Author Archives
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Analysis of Susan Sontag’s The Way We Live Now
First published in the New Yorker in 1986, Susan Sontag’s The Way We Live Now addresses AIDS in detail without ever mentioning the disease by name. The story subsequently appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1987, The Best American… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alice Munro’s Walker Brothers Cowboy
In this coming-of-age story set in rural Canada, Alice Munro presents the astute and keenly observant daughter of Ben Jordan, an unnamed and as yet unformed girl who begins to cross from youth to adulthood and learns the meaning of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Willa Cather’s A Wagner Matinée
Willa Cather‘s A Wagner Matinée was collected in both her first book of stories, The Troll Garden (1905), and a subsequent compilation, Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920). One of Cather’s earliest collected stories, “A Wagner Matin e” anticipates the mature… Read More ›
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Analysis of Raymond Carver’s Vitamins
As it appears in Raymond Carver’s short story collection Cathedral (1983), the story “Vitamins” is much more in the vein of the author’s earlier, considerably bleaker work. Certainly a sense of “dis-ease,” a term from the French existentialist writer Albert… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Steinbeck’s The Vigilante
John Steinbeck’s “The Vigilante,” as the earlier “The Snake”—both appearing in the story collection The Long Valley (1938)—has its roots in an actual event, a tragic kidnapping and murder that occurred in San Jose in 1933. Steinbeck transforms the event… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt
Originally published as the first narrative in a collection entitled The Illustrated Man, “The Veldt” was also one of three stories from the book adapted for a film version in 1969 and eventually published in play form, although neither of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems
Published in the Century Magazine in 1896, this composite story, consisting of 10 Sketches or Parables, depicts an individual’s struggle to construct beauty and order. The individual vignettes mirror facets of responsibility, growth, and sense of self-worth in a Dantesque… Read More ›
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Analysis of Dave Egger’s Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly
The longest story in Dave Egger’s critically acclaimed collection How We Are Hungry, “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly” has been praised as both Eggers’s “finest, darkest story” (Reese) and a must-read for would-be mountain climbers. A number of reviewers… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s Up in Michigan
Ernest Hemingway’s Up in Michigan, published in 1923 in his first collection, Three Stories and Ten Poems, and more widely distributed in his 1938 collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, is one of his most famous stories… Read More ›
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Analysis of William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished
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 ›
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Analysis of William Faulkner’s Two Soldiers
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 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s The Two Offers
Known as the first short story published by an African American, The Two Offers (1859) also marks Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s first published fiction. From this very first story, Harper emphasizes a womanhood of independence, education, equality, and charity. Harper does… Read More ›
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Analysis of Amy Tan’s Two Kinds
Two Kinds is a selection from Amy Tan’s (1952– ) critically acclaimed The Joy Luck Club (1989), which critics saw as an intricately woven “novel.” But that Tan intended the book to be read not as a novel but as… Read More ›
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Analysis of Willa Cather’s Two Friends
First published in Woman’s Home Companion in 1932 and included as one of three stories in the collection Obscure Destinies (1932), “Two Friends” has the structure and tone of a memoir. The story’s narrator is an adult looking back on… Read More ›
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Analysis of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
“The Turn of the Screw” was first published as a serial in Collier’s Weekly in 1898 and appeared later the same year in book form, in The Two Magics. Quickly becoming Henry James’s most popular piece of short fiction, The… Read More ›
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Analysis of Louisa May Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats
Often touted as Louisa May Alcott’s condemnation of Transcendentalism, “Transcendental Wild Oats” (first published in the Independent in 1873 and reprinted in the Woman’s Journal the following year) reshapes an actual occurrence in Alcott’s young life into hilarious but pointed… Read More ›
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Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
In The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories, the reader must take care to remember that the Tim O’Brien who appears as a character is not the same Tim O’Brien who wrote the book. This can… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains
Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” is the science fiction writer’s most widely anthologized short story. Originally printed in Collier’s, “Soft Rains” was revised and incorporated as a chapter in Bradbury’s first and most acclaimed novel, The Martian Chronicles…. Read More ›
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Analysis of William Faulkner’s That Evening Sun
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 ›
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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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