Who is John Galt? This question opens Ayn Rand’s acclaimed novel Atlas Shrugged. At first just a joke, this query begins a serious investigation on the part of protagonist Dagny Taggart to discover the identity of this man. She discovers… Read More ›
In World of Light, a 1979 documentary featuring May Sarton, the author frankly discusses many pressing concerns: attitudes toward the aged in the United States, being true to oneself, writing as self-realization, passionate relationships between women (sexual or otherwise), and… Read More ›
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner’s fifth novel, is the third set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and the first that identifies Yoknapatawpha County by name. The novel was written immediately after—although published before—Sanctuary, the sensational “potboiler” Faulkner had… Read More ›
Arrowsmith was one of five major novels that Sinclair Lewis wrote in the 1920s and the one for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It was turned into a popular movie in 1931 starring Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes…. Read More ›
Alice McDermott’s third novel, At Weddings and Wakes, is set in the early 1960s, soon after the assassination of President Kennedy. It is the story of the four Irish Catholic Towne sisters and their complicated relationship with their “Momma,” as… Read More ›
John O’Hara derived the title of his first novel from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppey, which features Death glibly describing the fate of a man who had tried to elude her: “I was astonished to see him in Baghdad,… Read More ›
This novel diverts the saga started in Love Medicine with the Morriseys, Lamartines, and Kashpaws by introducing new families and therefore, different realities and conflicts. For the difficulties resulting from assimilation conflicts and annihilation present in Erdrich’s earlier novels, Erdrich… Read More ›
Often overshadowed by The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn (1888) is an important novel for understanding Howells’s development as a novelist and a social critic. More than 100… Read More ›
In this autobiographical bildungsroman set in the colonial Antigua of Jamaica Kincaid’s own childhood, adolescence is figured as loss: loss of the protagonist’s irreplaceable bond with her mother, loss of friends that she outgrows, and finally loss of home, as,… Read More ›
Angle of Repose, for which Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, was written from 1968 to 1970, a turbulent period in U.S. history. Without directly discussing the Vietnam War, the cause for much of the turbulence, Stegner addresses… Read More ›
Literary naturalists, such as Theodore Dreiser, often depicted characters in urban, working-class settings. A scathing indictment of the American success myth, An American Tragedy describes two unequal Americas in unceasing struggle. The poor suffer, while the rich insist “how difficult… Read More ›
A New York Times 2001 Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001, American Son presents a grim view of immigrant status and violence in Southern California in the 1990s. This coming-of-age novel tells… Read More ›
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 ›
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