Frequently compared to Charles Dickens, critically acclaimed writer John Irving makes use of the bildungsroman genre in his sixth novel The Cider House Rules (1985). The novel follows the development of orphan Homer Wells, from his childhood during the early… Read More ›
Chaim Potok’s The Chosen is a novel about Orthodox and Hasidic Jews living in Brooklyn toward the end of World War II, written in a contemporary vernacular. It is about two kinds of orthodoxy and about two subcultures confronting each… Read More ›
The Cheer Leader was Jill McCorkle’s first novel, and it was published simultaneously with her second, July 7th, in 1985. Like most first novels, The Cheer Leader contains autobiographical elements. McCorkle, like her protagonist, grew up in North Carolina, where… Read More ›
J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, evolved over a 10-year period. In 1941, The New Yorker accepted Salinger’s “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” with Holden Caulfield as protagonist; however, because the magazine thought a story about… Read More ›
Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story—the first in his semiautobiographical trilogy, which includes The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997)—has become one of the classic “coming-out novels” that were a staple of emerging gay literature during… Read More ›
The second of twelve volumes in Powell’s roman-fleuve entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, this novel continues the first-person point of view narration of Nicholas Jenkins, a writer, as he enters the social whirl of debutante parties in… Read More ›
A celebration of London’s new multiethnic youth culture, this comic novel relates the adventures of the first-person narrator, Karim Amir, the 17-year-old son of a Muslim Indian businessman, Haroon, and an Englishwoman, Margaret. The family resides in the middle-class suburbs… Read More ›
This German word has been adopted in English literary criticism to refer to a novel of transition, the plot of which follows a protagonist from childhood or adolescence to adulthood. Novels of this sort frequently follow the outline of the… Read More ›
In Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes established a long-lasting model for stories about the education of the young. The novel is highly autobiographical, demonstrating how much Hughes enjoyed and benefited from his years attending Rugby, made famous by the… Read More ›
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