Bernard Malamud’s “The First Seven Years” was initially published in the Partisan Review (September–October 1950). In 1958 it was published as the first story in Malamud’s first collection of short fiction, The Magic Barrel. In the long opening paragraph Malamud… Read More ›
Short Story
Analysis of Anne Tyler’s The Feather behind the Rock
Anne Tyler recalls that as a young child she often made up stories, “Westerns, usually,” in which she pretended to be other people. “So far as I can remember,” she says, “mostly I wrote first pages of stories about lucky,… Read More ›
Analysis of Andre Dubus’s The Fat Girl
Andre Dubus, a Louisiana native and devout Catholic, created fiction often noted for its psychological realism and gentle morality. His short fiction emphasizes character study and examines moments of affection, violence, and self-discovery in American life. Dubus’s straightforward narrative contrasts… Read More ›
Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher
Long considered Edgar Allan Poe‘s masterpiece, “The Fall of the House of Usher” continues to intrigue new generations of readers. The story has a tantalizingly horrific appeal, and since its publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, scholars, critics, and general readers… Read More ›
Analysis of Grace Paley’s The Expensive Moment
Although Grace Paley has written a comparatively small body of work, publishing primarily short stories and poetry, she figures prominently among late 20th-century fiction writers. Part of her third collection of short stories, Later the Same Day (1985), “The Expensive… Read More ›
Analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge
As do many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” deals with the Christian concepts of sin and repentance. The specific sin O’Connor focuses on in this story is pride. As a Catholic, O’Connor considered this offense… Read More ›
Analysis of Alice Walker’s Everyday Use
Probably Alice Walker’s most frequently anthologized story, “Everyday Use” first appeared in Walker’s collection In Love and Trouble: Stories by Black Women. Walker explores in this story a divisive issue for African Americans, one that has concerned a number of… Read More ›
Analysis of Henry James’s Europe
“Europe,” originally published in the story collection The Soft Side, is a useful encapsulation in short story form of the symbolic use of Europe that Henry James had employed so successfully in the novella Daisy Miller and later in a… Read More ›
Analysis of Philip Roth’s Epstein
Lou Epstein, the eponymous narrator of “Epstein,” is having a hard time. At age 59, he finds himself experiencing a postmidlife crisis. His once-beautiful wife, Goldie, sags and nags; his daughter, Sheila, “a twenty-three-year old woman with ‘a social conscience!’… Read More ›
Analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s Entropy
Thomas Pynchon’s early short story “Entropy” heralds many of the thematic concerns and stylistic features that were to make his novels The Crying of Lot 49, V., and Gravity’s Rainbow central to the canon of American Postmodernism. Most notable of… Read More ›
Analysis of John Cheever’s The Enormous Radio
Opening with a description of a New York City couple, Jim and Irene Wescott, who aspire someday to move to Westchester, “The Enormous Radio”— first published in the New Yorker before reappearing in the 1953 collection The Enormous Radio and… Read More ›
Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The End of Something
Perhaps one of the most enigmatic of Ernest Hemingway’s stories, “The End of Something” was first published in the 1925 collection In Our Time, Hemingway’s first major literary effort and, as some would argue, his best individual collection of short… Read More ›
Analysis of Irwin Shaw’s The Eighty-Yard Run
Published in Esquire magazine in 1941, this remains one of Shaw’s most famous and enduring short stories. A seemingly simple tale of a 1920s college football player who cannot adjust to everyday life out of the limelight, nor to the… Read More ›
Analysis of Sherwood Anderson’s The Egg
Sherwood Anderson published his third short story collection, The Triumph of the Egg, which contains “The Egg,” in 1921. Narrated retrospectively by the nameless son, now an adult, the story of his father contains in its first paragraph the seeds… Read More ›
Analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment
A mendicant, a hedonist, a ruined politician, and a scandalous widow all answer the summons of their friend, a doctor, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1837 tale “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.” He calls these ageing friends to his study to participate in an… Read More ›
Analysis of Dorothy Allison’s Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know
“Those twin emotions, love and outrage, warred in me. . . . Nothing was clean between us, especially not our love.” In these two sentences, the narrator of “Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know” gives the reader a snapshot of… Read More ›
Analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person
Generally agreed to be one of Flannery O’Connor’s best stories as well as an excellent entrée to her work, “The Displaced Person” offers all the major hallmarks of the first-rate story. It first appeared in Sewanee Review in 1954. Echoing… Read More ›
Analysis of Kate Chopin’s Désirée’s Baby
Kate Chopin’s brief but mesmerizing story opens in medias res, with Madame Valmonde preparing to visit her adopted daughter, Desiree, recently married to the wealthy Louisiana plantation owner Armand d’Aubigny and even more recently delivered of a baby girl. Then,… Read More ›
Analysis of T. C. Boyle’s Descent of Man
T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Descent of Man” is not the first American short story to carry the title of Darwin’s controversial study of the evolutionary development of man. However, Edith Wharton’s “The Descent of Man” (1904) uses the title of Darwin’s… Read More ›
Analysis of Philip Roth’s Defender of the Faith
Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith” raises questions about identity and identification, and the complexities that arise when different aspects of a person’s self-concept are in conflict with one another. The story also invokes the ethical dilemmas that identification creates,… Read More ›
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