Recent Posts - page 3
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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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Analysis of Joyce Carol Oates’s American Appetites
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 ›
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Analysis of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart
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 ›
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Analysis of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
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 ›
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Analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses
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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Analysis of All the King’s Men Robert Penn Warren (1946)
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 ›
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Analysis of Milton Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body
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 ›
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Analysis of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams
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 ›
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Analysis of Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive
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 ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence continues to invite a wide range of analyses. The novel examines the triangle between Ellen Olenska, her cousin May Welland, and May’s husband, Newland Archer, against the background of upper-class society in 1870s New… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
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 ›
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Analysis of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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 ›
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Analysis of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
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 ›
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Analysis of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist
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 ›
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Analysis of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
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 ›
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Analysis of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Zima Station
An autobiographical poem that reflects on the past while looking toward the future, Zima Station (Stantsiya Zima) is a narrative of encounter and discovery told in a strong voice. Inspired by a 1953 visit to Yevtushenko’s family in Siberia, the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ernesto Cardenal’s Zero Hour
Zero Hour (1957; 1960) is the best-known example of Ernesto Cardenal’s “documentary” poetry and provides a fine example of the exteriorista poetry with which he is identified. The poem was originally conceived of as a longer epic poem about Central… Read More ›
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