Author Archives
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Analysis of John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven
“An often ignored collection of stories that appeared, unceremoniously, in 1932,” The Pastures of Heaven can be considered the cornerstone of much of John Steinbeck’s later, great fiction (Nagel xxix). Upon publication, although it was ignored for the most part… Read More ›
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Analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s Parker’s Back
“Parker’s Back” is an account of a man who, having obsessively covered most of his body with tattoos, surrenders to an impulse to have Christ’s face inscribed on his back. The last short story that Flannery O’Connor finished, and one… Read More ›
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Analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Pat Hobby Stories
In the last three years of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald was under contract as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. During the week he worked for the film industry; on weekends he pursued his own writing projects. He began a novel… Read More ›
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Analysis of Herman Melville’s The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids
Herman Melville’s two-part ironic sketch “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” provides in a highly condensed form the same sly insinuation and subversive conceptual punning that characterize his better-known longer works, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man…. Read More ›
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Analysis of William Faulkner’s Pantaloon in Black
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 ›
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Analysis of Bret Harte’s The Outcasts of Poker Flat
First published in the Overland Monthly in 1869, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” closely paralleled its companion story, “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” published in 1868, by introducing Americans in the eastern United States to the rough, violent, ungoverned West…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s The Other Two
Contributing to Edith Wharton’s imaginative explorations of evolutionary theory and to her ironic portrayals of marriage, “The Other Two,” appearing in The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904), foreshadows her later novel, The Custom of the Country (1913). Alice… Read More ›
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Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s On the Rainy River
An integral chapter in The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s “On the Rainy River” narrates the dilemma he faced during the summer of 1968 when he received his draft notice and considered fleeing to Canada. The story builds on a… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which was first published in 1973, then collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975), has appeared since then in multiple anthologies. The story is an allegory about… Read More ›
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Analysis of Theodore Dreiser’s Old Rogaum and His Theresa
“Old Rogaum and His Theresa” portrays the failure of authorities to instill traditional values in the younger generation and the power of dreams to make the tawdry seem beautiful. Set in Greenwich Village in New York City, the story offers… Read More ›
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Analysis of Willa Cather’s Old Mrs. Harris
Published in Ladies’ Home Journal (September– November 1932) as “Three Women” and included in the collection Obscure Destinies (1932), this story concerns three generations of women transplanted from Tennessee to the town of Skyline, Colorado. The differences in the women’s… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid
One of Edith Wharton’s many stories of New York, this novella was published with the subtitle The ’Fifties in 1924 as the second of four volumes in a set entitled Old New York. The story exemplifies Wharton’s use of irony… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
This classic story, first published in Ambrose Bierce’s short story collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, continues to intrigue new generations of readers. Although set during the civil war, it is notable not for the combat scenes that other Bierce… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
A tall tale laced with typical Twainian humor and irony and ultimately meant not to be believed but enjoyed, Mark Twain’s (Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s) “The Notorious [Celebrated] Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” first appeared in an 1865 issue of the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Katherine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine
Katherine Anne Porter’s story is subtitled “1896–1905,” but she wrote it in 1936, and the story has the unmistakable atmosphere of the Great Depression. Characters of ordinary background seem helplessly entangled in a web of Determinism in “Noon Wine”: the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Theodore Dreiser’s Nigger Jeff
“Nigger Jeff” is an early story in Theodore Dreiser’s career, but as his mature fiction does, it offers stark, detailed descriptions of powerful emotions that drive men and women into tragic situations. The story is a compelling and disturbing one… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s New Year’s Day
One of Edith Wharton’s many stories of New York, it was published with the subtitle The ’Seventies in 1924 as the last of four volumes in a set entitled Old New York. This novella depicts with subtle realism the reactions… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman’s A New England Nun
Originally published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1887 and in 1891 as the title story in A New England Nun and Other Stories, the story opens onto a scene of pastoral rural New England calm. In complete harmony with this scene… Read More ›
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New Criticism
New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those traditional “extrinsic” approaches that saw a text as making a moral or philosophical statement or as an outcome of social, economic, political, historical, or biographical… Read More ›
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Analysis of Willa Cather’s Neighbour Rosicky
First published in Woman’s Home Companion (April/May 1930) and included as one of three stories in Obscure Destinies (1932), “Neighbour Rosicky” dramatizes an old Bohemian farmer’s final days. The story is a character study of Anton Rosicky but also a… Read More ›
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