This historical novel about John Brown was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. At the time he was writing the novel, Russell Banks lived near North Elba, New York, the Adirondack community where Brown was buried…. Read More ›
Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter is widely recognized as the first novel published by an African American writer. The novel centers on Clotel, the mixed-race daughter of Thomas Jefferson, and explores the devastating effects of slavery, racial prejudice, and gender… Read More ›
Clay Walls narrates the story of a Korean immigrant family from about 1920 to 1946 and their struggle to find a place in American society. The novel develops chronologically and is divided into three sections. The first two are narrated… Read More ›
Frequently compared to Charles Dickens, critically acclaimed writer John Irving makes use of the bildungsroman genre in his sixth novel The Cider House Rules (1985). The novel follows the development of orphan Homer Wells, from his childhood during the early… Read More ›
Geremio is a proud bricklayer, emigrated from Italy and living on New York’s Lower East Side. He works on a job with his fellow immigrants and tries to keep them safe as their site boss cuts corners on building materials… Read More ›
Chaim Potok’s The Chosen is a novel about Orthodox and Hasidic Jews living in Brooklyn toward the end of World War II, written in a contemporary vernacular. It is about two kinds of orthodoxy and about two subcultures confronting each… Read More ›
Jessie Redmon Fauset was, for many decades, regarded mainly for her productive encouragement of other black writers—she is still renowned for being one of the “midwives” of the Harlem Renaissance. But for some years now, her four novels have been… Read More ›
Ann Beattie once said of her characters, “They are suffering. They are suffering” (Rothstein, 2). Chilly Scenes of Winter examines the particular suffering of 27-year-old Charles while he attempts to cope with his mother’s mental illness, works at a government… Read More ›
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, McCarthy spent his formative years in Knoxville, Tennessee, the setting for his fiercely exuberant fourth novel, Suttree (1979). Each of his previous novels—The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1974)—follows the… Read More ›
The Cheer Leader was Jill McCorkle’s first novel, and it was published simultaneously with her second, July 7th, in 1985. Like most first novels, The Cheer Leader contains autobiographical elements. McCorkle, like her protagonist, grew up in North Carolina, where… Read More ›
Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth was America’s first best-seller, with more than 200 editions published from the 18th through the 20th centuries. This sensational tale of a poor girl seduced and abandoned touched thousands of readers in the early… Read More ›
The Native sensibilities of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony that influence overall design, point of view, and character development, challenge the classically accepted definition of novel. Ceremony is a war story, and, like many others of its genre, revolves around the… Read More ›
Peter Bacho was born in Seattle in 1950, the son of immigrants from Cebu, the Philippines. His first novel, Cebu, won the 1992 American Book Award. Cebu is a quintessentially Filipino-American novel that explores culture clash, family history, identity, and… Read More ›
One of the founding works of antirealist or postmodern fiction, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 realizes an important aim of such writing: It renders a world through its language. Minimally drawn from Heller’s own experience as a bombardier in World War II… Read More ›
J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, evolved over a 10-year period. In 1941, The New Yorker accepted Salinger’s “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” with Holden Caulfield as protagonist; however, because the magazine thought a story about… Read More ›
Carrie was Stephen King’s first blockbuster novel. Constantly in print since its publication in 1974, it remains in the vanguard of the popular works—including more than 20 novels—by the prolific modern-day Edgar Allan Poe. In the introduction to Carrie, King… Read More ›
Walter M. Miller, Jr., saw the publication of the first of his Leibowitz short stories in 1955. His story about a brotherhood of monks and their connection to a long-dead scientist amid the ruins of civilization was a landmark in… Read More ›
Several critics have suggested that Cannery Row grew out of Steinbeck’s disgust for the battlefield during his assignment as a war correspondent in Germany and his desire to escape to something light and cheerful. Steinbeck affirmed this in various letters,… Read More ›
Comprising three self-contained yet interrelated sections of prose, poetry, and a play, Cane presents scenes of African-American life and features characters that attempt to reconcile opposites of the African-American experience. The book’s narrative events seem disconnected, and time flows irregularly…. Read More ›
The “Canary” Murder Case was the second of Philo Vance’s 12 interventions into the murder investigations of New York City district attorney John F. X. Markham. Vance is a young aesthete with “a liberal independent income” that enables him to… Read More ›
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