Author Archives
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Analysis of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Speckled Band
This locked-room mystery was published in February 1892 in the Strand Magazine, a popular illustrated periodical aimed at a middle-class family audience. By the time contemporaries encountered “The Speckled Band,” Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson were familiar from… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
This story first appeared in the Strand Magazine in the set of stories called The Return of Sherlock Holmes. It is one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and focuses on the power of the master blackmailer Charles… Read More ›
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Analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown
“Young Goodman Brown,” initially appearing in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) as both a bleak romance and a moral allegory, has maintained its hold on contemporary readers as a tale of initiation, alienation, and evil. Undoubtedly one of Nathaniel… Read More ›
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Analysis of Philip Roth’s You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings
Unlike the main characters in almost all of Philip Roth’s other texts, the narrator of “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” is nameless and never clearly identified as Jewish or non-Jewish, though his companions are Italian… Read More ›
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Analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko Yellow Woman
Leslie Marmon Silko writes stories that are derived directly from the oral tradition of storytelling prevalent in the Laguna Pueblo culture in which she was raised. She does so in an attempt to keep alive the stories that celebrate her… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper
First published in New England Magazine in January 1892, and reprinted by Small, Maynard and Company as a chapbook (1899), “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s most famous work. Depicting the nervous breakdown of a young wife and mother,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ethan Canin’s The Year of Getting to Know Us
“The Year of Getting to Know Us” is a story of desperation on many levels that demonstrate that Ethan Canin is able to draw characters that move readers through emotion. The story was originally published in 1987 in Atlantic Monthly… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s Xingu
Xingu is a satirical short story about a “Lunch Club” of several women, who are “indomitable huntresses of erudition” (203). They have invited the “celebrated” novelist Osric Dane to their next meeting, and in chapter 1 they prepare for the… Read More ›
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Analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams
Winter Dreams presents situations and themes that would preoccupy F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel The Great Gatsby, which also embodies American aspirations for social legitimacy and existential self-worth in the form of a longing to possess a desirable woman. Much… Read More ›
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Analysis of Eudora Welty’s Why I Live at the P.O.
Why I Live at the P.O. is probably Eudora Welty’s best-known and most anthologized short story. The story was first published in the Atlantic (1940) and appeared the following year in her first short story collection, A Curtain of Green and… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Steinbeck’s The White Quail
A wide variety of interpretations have greeted John Steinbeck’s “The White Quail” since its publication in The Long Valley in 1942. Some critics have used it as basic evidence of Steinbeck’s misogyny, believing that his portrait of Mary Teller is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron
This frequently anthologized Bildungsroman features Sylvia, a nine-year-old girl whose very name evokes the woods that she loves, and where she is walking when we first encounter her. She meets an attractive young man, a hunter and an ornithologist, who… Read More ›
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Analysis of Joyce Carol Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Probably the most gifted—and certainly the most prolific—literary talent of the second half of the 20th century, Joyce Carol Oates continues to be prolific into the 21st century. She has published more than 50 books; won the National Book Award… Read More ›
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Analysis of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love
Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” looks at love through two very different lenses. In conceiving the story, Carver apparently assumes that many of his readers were raised on the notion of fairy… Read More ›
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Analysis of Peter Taylor’s What Do You Hear from ’Em?
During the 1940s and 1950s, a new literary generation provided something of a transition between the southern renaissance and the post–southern renaissance period. The Pulitzer Prize–winning fictionist Peter Taylor (1917–94) proves a good example of this transitional group in terms… Read More ›
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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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