Ellis’s first-person account of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street type who kills between binges of good grooming, was a scandal even before its publication because its first contracted publisher refused to print it. Its horrific, some would say pornographic, depiction… Read More ›
Although it was written first, Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral is chronologically the second novel in his American Trilogy about postwar America, beginning with I Married a Communist (1998) and ending with The Human Stain (2000). Covering the period… Read More ›
When Norman Mailer released his serialized novel An American Dream in 1965, critics either praised him for his work or dismissed the novel as a failure. In this controversial novel, Mailer tells the story of Stephen Richards Rojack, a former… Read More ›
Bapsi Sidhwa, a Parsee (Zoroastrian) writer of Pakistani descent, was born in Karachi, then part of pre-partition India, and all her early fiction is set in Pakistan or India. She immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, and An… Read More ›
Before the film American Beauty, before Columbine, even before the Menendez brothers or JonBenet Ramsey became symbols of American suburban culture, Joyce Carol Oates had, in her fluid style, already shown the “dark side” of suburbia in American Appetites. Indeed,… Read More ›
Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, first published in 1943 and then in 1946, details the memories and experiences of a young immigrant from the Philippines. Bulosan’s travel narrative recounts the difficulties of his childhood in provincial Philippines, the… Read More ›
Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel focuses on Josef (Joe) Kavalier and Sammy Clay (né Klayman), two artistically gifted cousins who create the masked comic-book hero, The Escapist, modeled on Superman, in New York City just before, during, and after World… Read More ›
The publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 vaulted Cormac McCarthy into the spotlight of the American literary mainstream. Though his five previous novels had garnered consistently positive reviews and a number of awards, McCarthy had endured poor sales… Read More ›
America’s first poet laureate, Robert Penn Warren, was best known during his life as a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. However, his 1946 novel, All the King’s Men, has become his most recognized work since his death in 1987. The novel won… Read More ›
Almost every scholar of Asian American literature has acknowledged the brilliance of Milton Murayama’s first novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, and its notable contribution to local Hawaiian and Asian American literature. When All I Asking for Is… Read More ›
Although this book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, Booth Tarkington’s works remain on very few academic lists today. However, Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis in 1869, was quite popular during his lifetime. The Princeton-educated author lived more similarly to… Read More ›
A central but underappreciated figure in the emergence of American national literature, Royall Tyler (1757–1826) is probably best known for his nationalistic play The Contrast (1787), a fairly conventional comedy of manners distinguishing Yankee virtue from English vice. From a… Read More ›
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. The novel was Clemens’s sixth book, but only his second novel: Clemens’s earlier books were two collections of stories and sketches and two travel books, Innocents Abroad… Read More ›
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) began writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1876, immediately after he completed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mightily attracted to the character of Huck, who becomes a more complete and complex character in the final… Read More ›
Saul Bellow’s third novel and winner of the National Book Award, The Adventures of Augie March, came easily to him. Indeed, says Bellow, he began the novel in Paris, writing in trains and in cafés, then moving to Rome: “The… Read More ›
The Accidental Tourist (1985), Anne Tyler’s 10th novel, won the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for the most distinguished work of American fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a Warner Brothers feature-length film… Read More ›
Absalom, Absalom! was William Faulkner’s eighth novel and the first to include a map of its setting, the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. In many respects, it is Faulkner’s most ambitious work, and it caused him more trouble to write than… Read More ›
A slave narrative is an account of the life, or a major portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave personally. Slave narratives comprise one of the most influential traditions… Read More ›
The story of a disillusionment with respect to a misunderstood marriage, this novel of psychological realism is cast in the form of the recollections—with the full force of hindsight—of John Dowell, a wealthy American who has lost his wife, Florence,… Read More ›
Set in the Anglo-Irish world of “great houses” during their days of waning influence in the first half of the 20th century, this satire attacks the emotional frigidity of a society that has allowed propriety and decorum to replace sincerity… Read More ›
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