Recent Posts - page 2
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Analysis of Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
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 ›
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Analysis of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
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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Analysis of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is not an autobiography and not by Alice B. Toklas. Rather, it is a fictional text written by Gertrude Stein and populated by colorful characters that happen to share the names of real people,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord
Set near the source of the Amazon River in the Peruvian Andes, Matthiessen’s novel begins in the last outpost of civilization, a ramshackle mission town. Here, the missionaries Leslie and Andy Huben meet the newly arrived missionaries Martin and Hazel… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
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 ›
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Analysis of May Sarton’s As We Are Now
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 ›
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Analysis of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
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 ›
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Analysis of Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith
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 ›
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Analysis of Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes
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 ›
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Analysis of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra
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 ›
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Analysis of Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife
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 ›
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Analysis of William Dean Howells’s Annie Kilburn (1888)
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 ›
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Analysis of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John
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 ›
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Analysis of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose
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 ›
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Analysis of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy
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 ›
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Analysis of Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son
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 ›
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Analysis of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
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 ›
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Analysis of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
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 ›
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Analysis of Norman Mailer’s An American Dream
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 ›
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Analysis of Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat
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 ›
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