Black Boy, the first book-length installment of Richard Wright’s novelistic autobiography, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, the second of Wright’s works to be so recognized, the other being his enormously popular and important first novel Native Son (1940). In Black… Read More ›
Herman Melville began writing the manuscript that became Billy Budd, Sailor in 1886 near the end of his life. Although distinct parallels exist between the story and the historic Somers mutiny of 1842, in which Melville’s cousin was involved as… Read More ›
Many readers wrongly consider Raymond Chandler’s novels to be mere detective stories. The subtle nuances that mimic harsh reality in the plotlines and characterizations, however, help elevate Chandler’s work beyond the genre. This gritty realism could, in part, be a… Read More ›
The last of H. D.’s many autobiographical novels, Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) portrays the struggles of a female writer to realize her personal and artistic identity. The entire novel is mediated through the mind of Julia Ashton (H…. Read More ›
The grim novella Benito Cereno, written in 1855 during a transitional period in Melville’s career, represents a remarkable fusion of the themes and techniques that characterize his art. F. O. Mathiesson calls it “one of the most sensitively poised pieces… Read More ›
The Bell Jar, like so much of Plath’s writing, is loosely based on her own experiences; the novel was, in fact, originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas because Plath feared it might anger or hurt the people in her… Read More ›
Neither of Kosinski’s first two novels prepared his readers for his third, Being There. The Painted Bird (1965) is a fairly lengthy, nightmarish picaresque of a dark-complexioned young boy’s survival in the eastern European countryside during World War II. Stylistically,… Read More ›
“There is a thread beginning with my grandmother Adelaide and traveling through my father and arriving at me. That thread is flight” (335). It is telling that the identity of the Beet Queen is not revealed until the final section… Read More ›
With her debut novel about one girl’s experience as a spelling bee champion, Myla Goldberg explores the unraveling of a family. Bee Season is the story of the Naumanns, a deeply fractured and emotionally stunted family in which no one… Read More ›
In many ways, Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees, might be considered a conventional coming-of-age story, wherein a young woman follows the lead of her literary forebear Huckleberry Finn and journeys east to west on the road to independence…. Read More ›
Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine tells the story of a rural working-class community crumbling apart as big industry and corporate incursions leave its people having to survive by making money instead of supporting each other through farming, barter,… Read More ›
During a Penguin Online Auditorium conversation with college students in 1999, Dorothy Allison described her novel Bastard Out of Carolina as a “story about a working class family, people who are trying very hard to take loving care of each… Read More ›
Following the highly acclaimed short-story collection, Pangs of Love (1991), this debut novel by David Wong Louie represents an in-depth exploration of the theme of cultural assimilation. Critical opinion of The Barbarians Are Coming is generally very positive, praising Louie’s… Read More ›
When Robert Penn Warren published Band of Angels in 1955, the most frequent critical response was to compare the novel with Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 blockbuster Gone with the Wind. Such comparisons spoke volumes about the indelibility of Mitchell’s single novelistic… Read More ›
Carson McCullers’s short novel, The Ballad of the Sad Café, brings the uncanny to the fore. Three bizarre main characters populate the dreary southern landscape to advance McCullers’s recurrent themes of isolation and loss. The female Amazon figure, Miss Amelia… Read More ›
Published in 1922, Babbitt won praise from contemporary critics for Sinclair Lewis’s use of photographic realism, believable American dialogue, and satirical portrayal of small-town America. The novel relates the experience of businessman George Folansbee Babbitt in the typical Midwestern city… Read More ›
Critically attacked and dubbed scandalous in its own time, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) is one of the earliest American novels that openly confronts the subject of female sexual desire. The novel’s main character, Edna Pontellier, rejects the traditional roles… Read More ›
Literariness Journal Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Inaugural Issue) Theme: Digital and Analog Cultures The inaugural issue of Literariness Journal seeks contributions that interrogate the complex intersections between digital and analog cultures. We invite scholarship that explores the values, practices, technologies,… Read More ›
Although Ernest Gaines lived in California from the age of 15, all of his stories and novels are deeply rooted in the Black culture and storytelling traditions of his native Louisiana. Gaines was born on the River Lake Plantation in… Read More ›
This fictional autobiography and narrative achieved belated critical and commercial success during the Harlem Renaissance. The novel’s first audience took it to be a straight autobiography, much to the surprise of Johnson, who noted that it was no “human document.”… Read More ›
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