Gabriel Garcıa Marquez’s (1927-2014) One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published on May 30, 1967, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The cover of the first edition, which was never repeated, depicted the silhouette of a galleon floating amid trees against a… Read More ›
Of Love and Dust (1967) continues Gaines’s favorite themes, including the unequal distribution of wealth, race and caste, and the conflict between the past and change. Marcus Payne, awaiting trial for killing a man in a knife fight, is ‘‘bonded… Read More ›
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) argued that Italians are less suited temperamentally to writing novels than to writing poetry, essays, and biographies. Certainly, the art of storytelling has long been esteemed in Italy; Baldassare Castiglione, in Il cortegiano (1528; The Book of… Read More ›
Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) may be, quite simply, the single most important writer of short fiction in the history of Latino literature. The stories he published in his collections Ficciones, 1935-1944 and El Aleph, particularly the former, not… Read More ›
During his life, Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was a figure of controversy and so became reasonably well known in literary circles. Two of his works were recognized with prizes: Manuscript Found in a Bottle and The Gold-Bug. The Raven, his most… Read More ›
The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin,… Read More ›
Literature is forever transforming. A new literary age is new precisely because its important writers do things differently from their predecessors. Thus, it could be said that almost all significant literature is in some sense innovative or experimental at its… Read More ›
Iconoclastic and irreverent, the postmodern novel is by definition a radical experiment that emerges when a writer feels the customary tropes of fiction have been exhausted. For the postmodernist, the well-worn genre of the novel is insufficient and no longer… Read More ›
From the ancient belief in humors to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ psychoanalytic and pharmacological methodologies, diverse theories about the mind have affected the literary production of novelists. Categorization according to these theories is difficult, because authors tend to mix… Read More ›
Despite the debt the African-American short story owes to the “national art form,” as Frank O’Connor called the American short story, it, like the other genres of the African-American literary tradition, must be traced back to the site that in… Read More ›
Carson McCullers’s (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) fiction has a childlike directness, a disconcerting exposure of unconscious impulses in conjunction with realistic detail. She is like the candid child who announces that the emperor in his new clothes… Read More ›
To understand some of the ideas behind the counterculture revolution is to understand Ken Kesey’s (1935 – 2001) fictional heroes and some of his themes. Originating with the 1950’s Beat generation, the 1960’s counterculture youth were disillusioned with the vast… Read More ›
Although Günter Grass’s (1927 – 2015) novel The Tin Drum forms the first part of the Danzig Trilogy and shares some characters, events, and themes with Cat and Mouse and Dog Years, the novel was conceived independently and can be discussed… Read More ›
Almost from the beginning of his career, Kingsley Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) enjoyed the attention of numerous commentators. Because his works have been filled with innovations, surprises, and variations in techniques and themes, it is not… Read More ›
E. M. Forster’s (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) most systematic exposition of the novelist’s art, Aspects of the Novel, is no key to his own practice. Written three years after the publication of A Passage to India, the… Read More ›
Arthur Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) has been acclaimed as one of the most distinguished American dramatists since Eugene O’Neill, the father of modern American drama. Because of his direct engagement with political issues and with the… Read More ›
Some of Mailer’s earliest writing, including “The Greatest Thing in the World,” a prizewinner in a 1941 Story magazine contest, reveals that even at a very early age he could write accomplished, imitative apprentice fiction in the modes of Ernest… Read More ›
Stephen King (born. September 21, 1947) may be known as a horror writer, but he calls himself a “brand name,” describing his style as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.” His fast-food version… Read More ›
Turning away from a romanticized view of her own Virginia, Ellen Glasgow (April 22, 1873 – November 21, 1945) became a part of the revolt against the elegiac tradition of southern letters. Although she rejected romance, she did not turn… Read More ›
T. Coraghessan Boyle’s (1948- ) novels have been praised for their originality, style, and comic energy. At a time when his contemporaries seem obsessed with the mundane details of everyday life—presented in a minimalist style—Boyle approaches fiction as an iconoclastic… Read More ›
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