Recent Posts - page 65
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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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Analysis of Sherwood Anderson’s Death in the Woods
First published in American Mercury in 1926 and later in Sherwood Anderson’s collection Death in the Woods in 1933, “Death in the Woods” is his most frequently anthologized story, and Anderson considered it his best. Readers find it bleak, because… Read More ›
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Analysis of Margatet Atwood’s Death by Landscape
In “Death by Landscape,” Margaret Atwood rewrites early American stories about the wilderness from her own trenchant perspective. At the same time, the story finds literary ancestors in Edgar Allan Poe’s detective stories, especially the locked-room mystery (“The Murders in the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s A Day’s Wait
Ernest Hemingway’s A Day’s Wait, which was published in his 1927 collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, is representative of Hemingway’s short fiction in that it encompasses the subject matter and one of the more prevalent themes that… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ellen Glasgow’s Dare’s Gift
Dare’s Gift was completed by January 5, 1917, and published in Harper’s Magazine in March of that same year (Kelly 117). The story was later included in The Shadowy Third and Other Stories, published in 1923, and is included in… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Edgar Wideman’s Damballah
Through its 12 stories, the first of which is Damballah, traces the earliest tales of the characters who eventually play roles in the so-called Homewood Trilogy; some are even named after Wideman’s family members. On one level, the book is a… Read More ›
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Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s The Daemon Lover
In The Daemon Lover, James (Jamie) Harris, a handsome author, deserts his dowdy 34-year old fiancée. The plot of this short story may be indebted to “The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen, whom Jackson ranked with Katherine Anne Porter as… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Edgar Wideman’s Daddy Garbage
“Daddy Garbage” is the second story in John Edgar Wideman’s collection Damballah, the second book in Wideman’s Homewood Trilogy. “Daddy Garbage” follows “Damballah,” a tale of an African slave who, before his murder in 1852, transfers the African spiritual legacy… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs
Initially serialized in the Atlantic Monthly—the leading literary periodical when Sarah Orne Jewett was most prolific—The Country of the Pointed Firs is, according to many critics (as well as authors such as Willa Cather), her strongest and most representative work…. Read More ›
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Analysis of John Cheever’s The Country Husband
One of Cheever’s most frequently anthologized stories (along with “The Swimmer”), The Country Husband is the author’s modern take on the English bawdy Restoration comedy William Wycherly’s The Country Wife (1675). It was first published in Cheever’s collection The Housebreaker of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ambrose Bierce’s Chickamauga
Chickamauga is Cherokee for “bad water,” the name a branch of the tribe gave to the creek alongside which they lived in the northwest corner of Georgia when they were decimated by an outbreak of smallpox. Subsequent historians dubbed Chickamauga… Read More ›
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Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s Charles
Shirley Jackson’s (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) short sketch Charles is frequently anthologized primarily because of the appeal of its protagonist, Laurie Hymen, whose first days at kindergarten prefigure his rebellion against the school system and against authority… Read More ›
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Analysis of Stephen Vincent Benét’s By the Waters of Babylon
By the Waters of Babylon, first published in 1937, is a prescient science fiction story set in an indeterminate, postapocalyptic era, not uncommon for this genre; this lack of detailed setting suggests an unstable physical and social environment. Only gradually… Read More ›
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