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|  Essay on The Native American Literature |
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| The Native American Literature Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Native American novels and novelists exist in a complex historical and critical context. There are approximately 310 distinct Native American cultures existing in the continental United States, using languages from seven different language families. Speaking of Native Americans or Indians as though the members of various tribal societies hold a singular worldview comes from faulty and uninformed thinking. Native American novelists often identify themselves first according to their tribal affiliation, then according to their indigenous identity, and finally in terms of their American citizenship. Such categories, however, become further complicated by the... |
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| Essay on American Detective Fiction |
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| American Detective Fiction Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Detective fiction is often defined in narrow terms to avoid confusing it with crime fiction, spy fiction, or other classes of fiction that present a puzzle to be solved. Frederic Dannay, writing as his alter ego Ellery Queen in 1942, summed this up most succinctly when he called it "a tale of ratiocination, complete with crime and/or mystery, suspects, investigation, clues, deduction, and solution; in its purest form the chief characters should be a detective, amateur or professional, who devotes most of his (or her) time to the problems of detection." The pure detective novel begins with the crime (murder, robbery, or blackmail, for instance), during which the... |
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| Essay on The Latino Literature |
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| The Latino Literature Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Literary scholars face a formidable challenge in evaluating the Latino novel for two reasons. First, this kind of fiction expresses the divergent cultural histories of Hispanics in the United States from the 19th century to the present. Second, there is no consensus on the appropriate term for individuals of Spanish-speaking origin. The Census Bureau favors the term Hispanic and reports that they constitute the largest minority in the United States. Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans, as well as immigrants and exiles from Latin America, make up 12.5 percent of the U.S. population (Census 2000). On the other hand, artists, academics... |
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| Essay on The Asian-American Literature |
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| The Asian-American Literature Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The umbrella term "Asian-American novel" designates writing by people of national origins in countries like China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Singapore, Vietnam, and Cambodia who either were born in or immigrated to the United States. The expression "Asian American," popularized in the 1960s, promotes political solidarity and cultural recognition for Asian Americans, and stresses shared experiences of Asian immigrants in the United States. The narratives of Asian-American writers creatively engage the experience of being of Asian descent in the United States while dealing with the historical, linguistic, and ethnic specificities of each nationality. Early novels tended... |
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| Essay on The African-American Literature |
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| The African-American Literature Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In 1982, when Professor Henry L. Gates, Jr., published his "major discovery," Harriet Wilson's novel, Our Nig, or Sketches of a Free Black in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There (1859), identifying it as one of the first novels published by an African American, his "find" shook the foundation of the history of the development of the African-American novel. Scholars of the African-American literary tradition had remained unaware that Wilson, a free northern black, had published her novel a century and a quarter before its rediscovery, authentication, and republication; consequently, its significance had been completely ignored...
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| Essay on Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth |
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| Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Zuckerman Unbound, the second book in the Zuckerman Bound trilogy, follows Nathan Zuckerman as he tries to adjust to life and forge a new identity in the wake of the great success of his novel Carnovsky, which closely resembles Roth's own infamous Portnoy's Complaint in its concern with the carnal escapades of its young Jewish protagonist. With Carnovsky's publication came huge amounts of fame and money, but that's not all to which Zuckerman must adjust. Shortly before Carnovsky's publication, Zuckerman left his wife Laura and moved from New York's Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side; in matters of economics, public opinion, family, and home his life has changed drastically... |
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| Essay on The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw |
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| The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Irwin Shaw established himself as a major playwright. Between 1936 and 1945, seven of his plays were produced on Broadway. The most widely remembered has been the first, Bury the Dead, which was first produced on Broadway and published by Random House in 1936. Ironically, Shaw's first novel, The Young Lions, has also been typically considered his most ambitious and most successful effort in that genre, even though he would subsequently write 11 other novels. Shaw served in the military from 1942 to 1945. In The Young Lions, he combines a firsthand knowledge of military life with the progressive political convictions that define the themes... |
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| Essay on You Must Remember This by Joyce Carol Oates |
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| You Must Remember This by Joyce Carol Oates Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. With its title taken from Herman Hupfield's 1931 song "As Time Goes By," Joyce Carol Oates's novel You Must Remember This captures the worries of the decade 1946-56, with its concern over communism and nuclear war. This authorial remembering of a "now remote decade" is what excited Oates the most during the "fifteen months of its composition" (Oates 1988, 379). She based her fictional Port Oriskany on places she remembers from her youth; specifically, it is "an amalgam of two cities in upstate New York--Buffalo and Lockport . . ." (Oates 1988, 379). Although Oates sums the novel up as a family chronicle, it is young Enid Stevick who interests the reader most. Enid's passion... |
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| Essay on Yo! by Julia Alvarez |
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| Yo! by Julia Alvarez Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. More than merely a sequel to Alvarez's brilliant How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo! is a response to that earlier narrative, a metafictional tour de force that reflects on the nature, power, and effects of stories and storytelling. Yolanda Garcia, the narrator of the first book, becomes the subject of the second volume recounted, in turn, by many of the characters she had previously written about. After infuriating her family by writing about them in the first novel, she is converted into the target of their creative imagination, and Yo! gathers the responses of the people around her to Yolanda's need to write about what she knows. The first novel described Yolanda's act of... |
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| Essay on Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra by Tomas Rivera |
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| Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra by Tomas Rivera Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. This widely acclaimed novel by Tomas Rivera was published in 1971 under the auspices of Quinto Sol, of which prize the author was the first recipient the same year of its publication. First published entirely in Spanish, . . . Y no se lo trago la tierra/ . . . And the Earth Did Not Part became . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him in a bilingual edition, including Evangelina Vigil-Pinon's translation into English for Arte Publico Press in 1987. Rivera always refused to write in English, so it had to be his good friend Rolando Hinojosa-Smith who re-created the novel under the title of This Migrant Earth, also published in 1987 by Arte Publico Press. Both Rivera... |
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| Essay on The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
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| The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In January 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, through her novella The Yellow Wallpaper, first revealed to her readers the horror of the then-popular "rest cure," a remedy often prescribed for women suffering from what was then diagnosed as neurasthenia or hysteria. The story, printed in The New England Magazine, with illustrations by Jo. H. Hatfield, appeared as a hybrid fictional form--combining influences of both sentimental fiction and an American gothic tradition, as well as including some autobiographical elements. Gilman, who would become a vocal advocate for feminist social issues, had known the extreme isolation and severe psychological distress that the rest... |
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| Essay on A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris |
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| A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Michael Dorris's first novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water is sometimes categorized as young adult fiction. Themes of initiation, maturation, discrimination, peer problems, and family confusions all speak to young adult readers. The three first-person narrators also suggest such a categorization. The novel begins with the voice of 15-year-old Rayona, narrating the disintegration of her family. When the novel moves to the two other first-person narrators, each also begins her section of the novel with a significant event in her 15th year. Yet the novel is not strictly for young adults; the label is not inappropriate, only limiting. The characters in A Yellow Raft... |
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| Essay on The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings |
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| The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Set in the rural landscape of Cross Creek, Florida, where Rawlings resided, The Yearling may seem like a rather local, time and place-specific novel. Rawlings's uncompromising use of the region's dialect suggests this localness. The devotion to the sound of rural Florida speech sometimes manifests itself in benign comedy. For instance, "Ma" Baxter stipulates a "carefully written" list of items to be purchased during a trip to town: She demands "A haf bolt perty blue and wite check gingham for Mrs. B now a real perty blue." Later, she chides her son, Jody, for using grammar incorrectly: "You'd ought to say, 'The roaches has eat it,' " she confidently asserts. This vivid... |
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| Essay on World Enough and Time by Robert Penn Warren |
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| World Enough and Time by Robert Penn Warren Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. No single work better reveals Robert Penn Warren's purposes than World Enough and Time, which appeared in 1950 in the middle of his career. Subtitled A Romantic Novel, Warren's fiction re-creates the historical case of the "Kentucky Tragedy," a sensational story of love and jealousy, then of murder and suicide, earlier taken as a literary subject by 19th-century Southern writers including William Gilmore Simms and Edgar Allan Poe. However, Warren chooses Nathaniel Hawthorne as his model, especially in terms of The Scarlet Letter, published just a century earlier, in 1850. As in Hawthorne's "The Customs House" preface, Warren's own voice seems to discuss the documents... |
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| Essay on The World According To Garp by John Irving |
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| The World According To Garp by John Irving Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The World According to Garp, published in 1976, brought John Irving out of the arena of critically acclaimed but lackluster-selling fiction to critically acclaimed and best-selling fiction, an arena the East Coast-based author has yet to leave. Garp won an American Book Award for best paperback novel, and in 1983 director George Roy Hill brought Garp's unique world to the silver screen. Many of Irving's other novels have graced movie theaters, among them The Hotel New Hampshire, A Prayer for Owen Meany (released under the title Simon Birch), and most recently The Cider House Rules, for which Irving won a best-adapted screenplay Oscar. While his other work cannot... |
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| Essay on Women by Charles Bukowski |
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| Women by Charles Bukowski Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In no other work does Charles Bukowski seem to exhibit himself as purely as he does in Women (1978). Nothing else could account for the book's enduring appeal and seductiveness. It is true that the main character has a pseudonym, Henry Chinaski, and there is a publisher's note that says, "This novel is a work of fiction and no character is intended to portray any person or combination of persons living or dead" (6). And yet there are seemingly no other masks or precautions. Throughout this work, Bukowski, apparently, shows himself as himself, revealing to the reader his self in all its ugliness and misanthropy. It is no accident, from this perspective, that Women is almost completely... |
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| Essay on The Woman Who Owned the Shadows by Paula Gunn Allen |
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| The Woman Who Owned the Shadows by Paula Gunn Allen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. According to Paula Gunn Allen, "stories out of the oral tradition, when left to themselves and not recast by Indian or white collector, tend to meander gracefully from event to event; the major unifying device . . . is the relationship of the tale of the ritual life of the tribe" (Allen 1992, 153). This then is the structure of her 1983 novel The Women Who Owned the Shadows, which contains any number of stories from Keres and Navajo oral tradition and history, as well as stories of the half-breed Guadalupe protagonist Ephanie Atencio and her grandmother. In fact, according to Elizabeth Hanson, "It's setting, time, plot, and characters are derived... |
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| Essay on The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston |
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| The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best book of nonfiction published in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts chronicles pivotal phases of a Chinese-American woman growing up in California. Through her childhood memories, Kingston, "fictionalizing" the episodes in an autobiographical manner, integrates her mother's stories told to her as a child. The narrative shifts between different voices of various generations, jumping from the past to the present. Using the story of the legendary woman warrior Fa Mu Lan, Kingston astutely reinscribes the Chinese myth within the Western context. Fa Mu Lan, who disguised... |
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| Essay on Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy |
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| Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is a novel that fits into many categories: fantasy, women's literature, and utopian literature. As a novel produced during the active second wave of American feminism, it questions the roles of women within American society. Further, it anticipates the more inclusive third wave of feminism, in that it explores elements of class and race as well: Connie, the protagonist of the novel, is a poor Chicana who is unjustly committed to an insane asylum due to her attempt to protect her niece from physical and sexual abuse. Geraldo follows Dolly to Connie's home and breaks in as Connie attempts to protect Dolly, physically abusing... |
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| Essay on A Woman of Genius by Mary Austin |
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| A Woman of Genius by Mary Austin Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. One of Mary Austin's earliest novels, A Woman of Genius, remains, as Nancy Porter observed in 1985, an often "overlooked classic of feminism" (297), despite Austin's recovery as a significant literary regional writer, one whose characters "gain their identity from the regions they inhabit" (Fetterly and Pryse, xvii). Described by its first-person narrator, Olivia Lattimore, as "the story of the struggle between a Genius for Tragic Acting and the daughter of a County Clerk, with the social ideal of Taylorville, Ohianna, for the villain," this "drama" is also, Olivia tells her readers, "one in which none of the characters played the parts they were cast for, and invariably... |
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| Essay on Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor |
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| Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In 1962, 10 years after publishing Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor explained her first novel was "about a Christian malgre lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death" (2). The malgre lui is the text's protagonist, Hazel Motes, who finds divine redemption through suffering, despite his attempts to evade both by denouncing Christ. Through the figure of Motes, the novel posits nihilism as a false antithesis to faith, as his asserted belief in nothing inadvertently affirms his faith in Christ. A devout Catholic her entire life, O'Connor develops the theme of redemption in the text by employing comic and grotesque... |
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| Essay on Winter in the Blood by James Welch |
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| Winter in the Blood by James Welch Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Perhaps arriving in a very timely fashion, James Welch's first novel, Winter in the Blood, helped established Welch as a major figure in what critic Kenneth Lincoln dubbed the "Native American Renaissance," a period of interest in Native American writing that began in the late 1960s and peaked in the 1970s. Many works by Native American authors in this time period, including Welch, twist together traditional Native modes of storytelling and other cultural ideas with plots that reflect the life of contemporary Native peoples, focusing on the bleak life on modern reservations, alcoholism, depression, suicide, and feelings of alienation. Another important thematic idea... |
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| Essay on The Winds of War by Herman Wouk |
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| The Winds of War by Herman Wouk Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Herman Wouk achieved early critical and commercial success, especially with his third novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951), for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. For that novel, he drew directly on his experiences as a naval officer during World War II. Its success made him begin to conceive a much more expansive fictional treatment of the war, a novel that would suggest the massive scale on which the war had been conducted. Although Wouk's next three novels--Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Youngblood Hawke (1962), and Don't Stop the Carnival (1965)--were commercially successful (all three were, for instance, Book of the Month Club selections), the critical response seemed to become... |
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| Essay on Wind From an Enemy Sky by D'arcy McNickle |
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| Wind From an Enemy Sky by D'arcy McNickle Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In 1936, D'Arcy McNickle's first novel, written under the name "D'Arcy Dahlberg," was rejected by Harcourt, Brace, and Company. One reader's response to the novel, included in the rejection letter, contained a portentous comment: "Perhaps the beginning of a new Indian literature to rival that of [the] Harlem [Renaissance]" (Owens, 60). The novel was eventually published as The Surrounded, and the reader's comments proved to be true, as D'Arcy McNickle and John Joseph Mathews are seen today as two writers from the first half of the 20th century who strongly influenced the Indian writers of the 1960s and 1970s. One could argue, perhaps correctly, that these two writers... |
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| Essay on Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife by William H. Gass |
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| Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife by William H. Gass Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife self-consciously defies an unreflective and unengaged reader/text interaction. Originally published as an oversize volume featuring page signatures of varying color, texture, and thickness, Gass's work of fiction even challenges the conventional materiality of the book form. Punctuated with nude pictures of a buxom young woman (perhaps referring to the wife in the title, but as we read, representation as such becomes more and more complicated), the "text" of the novel speaks to itself--its own conventions, limitations, even desires--as the reader must balance the narrative of the text as "imagination imagining itself imagine"... |
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| Essay on Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka |
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| Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Lois Ann Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers begins with an ending, specifically "Happy Endings," the first chapter of her debut novel. Readers quickly realize that the happy ending of the initial chapter's title alludes not to the tone of the novel but to the longing of the adolescent protagonist, Lovey Nariyoshi, for she desires to live the life of her movie idol, Shirley Temple, fantasizing about a screen life far different from her own. Yamanaka's quirky coming-of-age story is set in the mid-1970s in Hilo, Hawaii, and chronicles a year in Lovey's life as she grows from being 12 and playing with Barbie dolls to attending the junior high school... |
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| Essay on Wife by Bharati Mukherjee |
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| Wife by Bharati Mukherjee Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Bharati Mukherjee's second novel, Wife, opens in Calcutta with Dimple Dasgupta's father seeking her a suitable mate of appropriate caste, an engineer, by scouring matrimonial advertisements. When we first meet Dimple she is fantasizing about marriage, not to an engineer, but to a neurosurgeon. She imagines it will bring her freedom, love, and a more desirable life. Life has so far been simply a rehearsal for real life, the kind of real life that comes with marriage; for marriage brings opportunities that single women are denied in Indian culture, and Dimple longs for those freedoms more than anything. Dimple worries that she is not fair or bosomy enough for marriage. From the start... |
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| Essay on Wieland; Or the Transformation, an American Tale by Charles Brockden Brown |
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| Wieland; Or the Transformation, an American Tale by Charles Brockden Brown Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Wieland; or the Transformation, an American Tale, was greatly admired by Charles Brockden Brown's contemporaries, an important influence on later American writers like Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, and judged today by critics as among the greatest, if not the greatest work by an early American author. Set in the years before the Revolutionary War in rural Pennsylvania, the tale is written in an "Americanized Gothic style," meaning the story is psychologically complex, dark, and mysterious (Watts, 72). Clara Wieland, sister to the titled character, narrates the novel. Though Clara is passive at times, in general, she is as resilient... |
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| Essay on Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore |
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| Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Lorrie Moore's fourth work of fiction, Frog Hospital, is narrated by Berie Carr, a photograph curator at a Midwest museum who is approaching 40. When the story opens, she is in Paris with her husband, Daniel, a medical researcher, who is attending a professional conference. It's clear from the outset that troubles threaten their childless marriage, as Berie observes: "I feel his lack of love for me" (5). Perhaps because of her marital problems, while in Paris Berie conjures pleasant memories of summer 1972, when she was 15 and living with her middle-class family in the town of Horsehearts, in Upstate New York. The local draft board has sent many of the... |
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| Essay on White Noise by Don DeLillo |
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| White Noise by Don DeLillo Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Don DeLillo's novel White Noise has been hailed by many critics as a model of postmodern writing for both form and content. The novel is composed of a barrage of images and words gleaned from the ever-increasing media consumption of one typical American family intermingled with the musings and anxieties of the novel's central character. DeLillo uses this format to expose and discuss the intrusion of media, industry, and technology into the lives of 20th-century Americans as we struggle to rediscover meaning and identity in an increasingly globalized community. DeLillo's exaggerated portrait of the "typical" American family, immersed in the mindless babble of a technocentric culture... |
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| Essay on White Mule by William Carlos Williams |
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| White Mule by William Carlos Williams Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. At the beginning of White Mule, a baby girl is born into an immigrant home in upper Manhattan circa 1900. Williams, who was a pediatrician as well as a poet, describes the birth clinically, as only a doctor would: "In behind the [baby's] ears there was still that white grease of pre-birth." Williams is a tough writer, and on the surface he is unsentimental about birth and motherhood. As soon as the baby is born, its mother, a Norwegian immigrant named Gurlie Stecher, tells the midwife to "Take it away. I don't want it. All this trouble for another girl." Gurlie had wanted all boys, and now she is irritated at having to look after her second girl. This birth, unremarkable yet... |
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| Essay on White Fang by Jack London |
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| White Fang by Jack London Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Following the success of his earlier novel The Call of the Wild (1903), Jack London turned his attention to a new story inspired by life in the North. White Fang was intended as a companion, indeed the antithesis, to The Call of the Wild. London stated that he was "going to reverse the process" (14). White Fang would present the civilization or evolution of a wolf-dog rather than the decivilizing of a dog. This story would depict the wild animal brought under the forces of domesticity, morality, love, and faithfulness and treated to the amenities of modern society. In The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf, a domesticated creature (Buck, Humphrey van Weyden) is forced to become... |
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| Essay on When the Rainbow Goddess Wept by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard |
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| When the Rainbow Goddess Wept by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Drawing in part from the recollections of her parents, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard commemorates the suffering and triumph of the Filipino people during World War II in When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, originally published in the Philippines in 1991 as Song of Yvonne. Nine-year-old child-narrator Yvonne Macaraig and her upper-middle-class parents leave their home in edenic Ubec, a fictional city based on Brainard's native Cebu, in 1941 to join the guerilla movement, assuming that America will win the war in six months. They are rapidly disabused of this hope: They suffer hunger, deprivation, and threats from Japanese soldiers. Yvonne's delicately... |
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| Essay on We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson |
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| We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson's final novel, is a witty, poignant, and ultimately chilling tale of madness, misanthropy, and sisterly love. A powerful and wickedly humorous fictionalization of the Lizzie Borden murder case, the novel represents the culmination of preoccupations present in Jackson's writing from the very beginning of her career and is considered, along with The Haunting of Hill House, one of her finest accomplishments. The novel was anticipated in a journal entry Jackson made toward the beginning of her career, an entry which, as S. T. Joshi has noted, serves as an accurate encapsulation of her work... |
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| Essay on The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes |
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| The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Langston Hughes, a towering figure in American literature, is certainly best known for his poetry. His nonfiction work, and also his ill-fated dramatic collaboration with Zora Neale Hurston, Mule Bone, also hold places of prominence in the study of African American literature. Nonetheless, his 1933 work The Ways of White Folks stands as a significant literary achievement in its own right. With its stunning array of characters and its vivid depiction of the often explosive nature of social contact between black and white Americans in the first half of the 20th century, this collection of stories is another example of Hughes's prolific and varied contribution to the...
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| Essay on War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk |
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| War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Herman Wouk's popular novel The Winds of War (1972) chronicles the events leading up to the American involvement in World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The story is told largely through the experiences of naval attache Victor "Pug" Henry and those of the members of his expanding and increasingly scattered family. Pug is stationed in Berlin as the Nazi aggressions are beginning, and because of his astute observations, he soon becomes a personal adviser to President Roosevelt. War and Remembrance picks up the story in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor and chronicles events in the European and Pacific theaters of the World War up to the... |
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| Essay on Waiting To Exhale by Terry McMillan |
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| Waiting To Exhale by Terry McMillan Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Waiting to Exhale is the third novel by Terry McMillan, after Mama (1987) and Disappearing Acts (1989). Immensely popular, especially since its film adaptation in 1995, the novel strengthened McMillan's popularity in her main audience (African-American women) while also appealing to a wider public. The novel traces the lives, friendship, and ties of four women in their 30s, Savannah, Bernardine, Robin, and Gloria, at various points. They have different views of the world and in their place in it, but nonetheless all of them share a common trait: They are looking for a good man, for a potential "Mr. Right" to replace the imperfect men they have encountered up to this point... |
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| Essay on Waiting by Ha Jin |
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| Waiting by Ha Jin Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Ha Jin's second novel, Waiting, winner of the 1999 National Book Award, set in Jilin Province in Northeast China, has a deceptively simple plot based on a triangle relationship. Manna Wu, a nurse in an army hospital, is in love with Dr. Lin Kong, but has to wait 18 years for him to divorce his wife, Shuyu, a peasant woman whom Lin married out of filial obligation. Lin's parents need a kind, dutiful daughter-in-law to take care of them in their old age. This plot is laid out in the prologue, which begins with Lin's apparently comic, yet intriguing saga of divorce: "Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Together they had appeared at the courthouse in Wujia Town... |
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| Essay on The Voice at the Back Door by Elizabeth Spencer |
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| The Voice at the Back Door by Elizabeth Spencer Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Although Elizabeth Spencer wrote The Voice at the Back Door while in Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and although it appeared in print after she had permanently moved to the North, the book's subject is near to her Southern roots. It deals with race relations in Lacey, Mississippi, a fictional small town much like Carrollton, where Spencer grew up. The author commented in an interview that the racist attitudes the book records from the early 1950s are part of the reason she left the South. The novel received almost universal praise from reviewers, and it was compared to the novels of William Faulkner for its examination of Southern attitudes and apt portrayal of... |
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| Essay on The Virginian by Owen Wister |
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| The Virginian by Owen Wister Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published in 1902, Owen Wister's The Virginian was reprinted 15 times within its first eight months and sold more than any other book during 1902-03 (Etulain, 11). Its popularity has been steady over the last hundred years. Hollywood has made four versions of The Virginian, including Ted Turner's 2000 production (Graulich, 299). The novel has inspired dozens of formula westerns by authors such as Zane Grey and Max Brand (Etulain, 36). And it is still widely read and studied in college classrooms across the country. So what about this book continues to interest both casual reader and scholar? The Virginian is certainly a romantic tale of the ultimate American folk hero: Wister's... |
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| Essay on Virginia by Ellen Glasgow |
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| Virginia by Ellen Glasgow Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Many critics have described Glasgow's Virginia as the turning point in her prolific writing career. As Dorothy Scura notes, it is in Glasgow's 10th novel that her ideas about "women and freedom" (40) come to the forefront and find expression for the first time in a female protagonist (30). Glasgow's Virginia becomes both a psychological and literary battleground for the author's conflicting ideas about womanhood. Glasgow juxtaposes many different images of women throughout her novel, always exposing the more pitiable characteristics of some by the more positive expressions of others. The innocent shyness and intellectual emptiness of Virginia Pendleton, for example, is cleverly... |
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| Essay on The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor |
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| The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. While much of the literary criticism on Flannery O'Connor's complicated novel The Violent Bear It Away rightly focuses on religion, the novel also offers a strong indictment against formal education and its outcomes. The action shifts between Francis Tarwater's burden to complete the religious work of his great-uncle, Mason Tarwater, who has died when the story opens, and the struggle of Francis's cousin, Rayber, a school teacher who conducts sociological research, to convince Francis of the possibilities of living a more modern and secular life. Mason Tarwater's legacy to his nephew, Francis, is that he will become a prophet and baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop... |
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| Essay on Venus Envy by Rita Mae Brown |
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| Venus Envy by Rita Mae Brown Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Although Venus Envy could be read as a sequel to Rita Mae Brown's earlier work Rubyfruit Jungle, this novel tackles issues and characters that are vastly different. While Rubyfruit's protagonist, Molly Bolt, deals with growing up as a confidently gay woman and struggles to complete her journey from poverty to artistic success, in Venus Envy we encounter a woman who risks all that has brought her social and material comfort in order to face her own fears concerning her sexuality. In this sense, there couldn't be a wider chasm between Molly and Frazier Armstrong. While Molly struggles against others, Frazier must ultimately confront herself. Venus Envy reads much like a comedy... |
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| Essay on Valis by Philip K. Dick |
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| Valis by Philip K. Dick Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Valis is this prolific science fiction writer's masterpiece. It represents Dick's attempt to use fictional narrative as a way of making sense of visionary experiences he had undergone in February and March 1974, whose dubious significance he had spent eight years and over 2 million words in his journal commentaries, "Exegesis," trying to comprehend. These experiences began with a visitation, recorded in the novel. A mesmerizingly beautiful black-haired girl (a recurring motif in his writing that is usually identified with desire and torment) delivers a prescription of pain killers for an impacted wisdom tooth. His attention is drawn to the centerpiece of her gold... |
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| Essay on V. by Thomas Pynchon |
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| V. by Thomas Pynchon Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V., published in 1963, contains more than 200 character names and a dizzying array of plots; nevertheless, it focuses primarily upon two narrative threads. The first is the story of Benny Profane, a drifter looking for meaning in contemporary (1950s) America. The second features Herbert Stencil, a privileged European drifting around the European-American world searching for meaning attached to a reference in his father's journal: a woman called, simply, V. The two narrative threads intertwine as Profane and Stencil meet as part of a group of young people in New York called The Whole Sick Crew. By means of their struggles for meaning, Pynchon is able to draw... |
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| Essay on U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos |
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| U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Composed of The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936), John Dos Passos's U.S.A. stands alongside James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy as one of the most important works of American literature to come out of the 1930s. Rarely read today or discussed in classrooms, U.S.A. has often been lumped together with the proletarian literature of its time and thus is seen more as a sociohistorical or political document. Certainly, Dos Passos's trilogy is informed by leftist politics and by the radicalization he underwent during and after his involvement with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but to dismiss it on such grounds is to oversimplify the... |
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| Essay on Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe |
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| Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe's controversial fictional account of the horrors of slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was written in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. A best-selling novel of the 19th century, it contributed to the rise of antislavery sentiment before the Civil War. Many critics interpret the characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin to be stand-ins for various groups in society. The evil slave-holder Simon Legree, whose horrific treatment of his slaves leads ultimately to the death of the novel's namesake, represents the worst of the Southern slave-holding aristocracy. Uncle Tom represents Stowe's notion of people of color. She writes that Tom "had, to the full, the gentle... |
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| Essay on Typical American by Gish Jen |
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| Typical American by Gish Jen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Gish Jen's Typical American is a landmark novel in Chinese-American women's writing. It stands apart from the West Coast second-generation writing of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan in that it deals with great irony and humor with the immigrant life of a Chinese family in the New York region. The novel concentrates on the lives of the central characters Ralph, Theresa, and Helen Chang after their arrival in the United States from China. Although they initially have a strong sense of their Chinese identity, the fact that they are known in the novel by their American names reveals the absence of any concern or backward glances to China. Despite being set in the context of a Chinese... |
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| Essay on Trout Fishing In America by Richard Brautigan |
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| Trout Fishing In America by Richard Brautigan Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Some critics consider Trout Fishing in America a cult book; a band took the name as its own, and one person legally changed his name to the title. Popularly, it is too often dismissed as happy, hippy nonsense. However, the novel deserves greater attention and serious study. Richard Brautigan is a conservationist of the imagination and uses the American West as metaphor, hoping to regain the open range of the mind. His narrator's whimsical, ironic humor and the simplicity of his prose, ironically, disguise a complex web of literary allusions and symbolism. Some of the literary range Brautigan covers is Ben Franklin's autobiography (Franklin is mentioned frequently... |
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| Essay on Tropic Of Capricorn by Henry Miller |
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| Tropic Of Capricorn by Henry Miller Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. A "prequel" to the more uniformly admired Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn continues Miller's mythologized autobiography, concentrating on his time in 1920s New York before leaving his first wife for Paris expatriate life, the fallout from which is chronicled in Cancer. Depending on whom you ask, Capricorn is either the sloppiest or most formally innovative of Miller's works--George Wickes characterizes it as "more disconnected than the rest of his books, creating the impression that he was constantly distracted, 'a pastiche of brilliant passages,' which by their discontinuity indicate where he sat down to write and where he left off." In keeping with... |
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| Essay on Tropic Of Cancer by Henry Miller |
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| Tropic Of Cancer by Henry Miller Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. "It may well be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for any of us," wrote Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer, "but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentations! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!" (257). Tropic of Cancer, Miller's first published book, is such a dance, a full-bodied, hot-blooded celebration of joy and pain, of lust and decay, of poverty and plenty. Its frankness so shocked censors upon its publication... |
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| Essay on Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book by Maxine Hong Kingston |
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| Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book by Maxine Hong Kingston Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The first of her Chinese immigrant parents' American-born children, Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, where she lived until she attended the University of California. Initially an engineering student, she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English in 1962. Since that time, she has published several essays, short stories and novels, including Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989). Kingston's focus on the experiences of Chinese Americans places her in the company of such other Chinese-American writers as Amy Tan and Frank Chin. Her focus on gender issues parallels that of other ethnic... |
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| Essay on The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain |
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| The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) began writing the book that would become The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson in the early 1890s. A manuscript version of the novel, which included a long portion that would become the companion piece Those Extraordinary Twins, was completed in 1892 while the Clemenses were living in Italy; however, Clemens had to revise the manuscript substantially before eventually publishing Pudd'nhead Wilson serially in the Century magazine from December 1893 to June 1894. The aesthetically challenged book was published late in 1894: It remains open to charges of narrative confusion and structural weakness. The novel has gained in... |
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| Essay on Tracks by Louise Erdrich |
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| Tracks by Louise Erdrich Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Louise Erdrich's Tracks is the third installment in a five-book sequence that began with Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen (1986) and concluded with The Bingo Palace (1994) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). Often compared to William Faulkner because of her use of multiple narrators, her sustained development of a single fictional setting (the imaginary town of Argus, North Dakota), and her exploration of family life across generations, Erdrich has also been deeply influenced by traditional Anishinaabe (Chippewa) mythology and culture. In Tracks, she draws heavily on this heritage to tell a story about the cultural fragmentation following the... |
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| Essay on To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee |
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| To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird draws from the author's loving recollections of her own childhood in the South. Set during the Depression in the small rural Alabama town of Maycomb, the story is told by child-narrator Jean Louise Finch, nicknamed Scout, daughter of widowed lawyer Atticus Finch. Not quite six when the novel opens, Scout relates many events of interest to herself and her older brother Jem over the course of three summers, but the two constant narrative strands are the children's obsession to see their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley, and the trial of the Negro laborer Tom Robinson for the alleged rape of... |
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| Essay on Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell |
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| Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published as a novel in 1932 and staged as a drama in New York City in 1933, Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road shocked readers and audiences alike with its unflinching portrait of the last, starving days of impoverished Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his family. Critics could not reconcile Caldwell's mix of grotesque comedy and social realism, unsure of whether to laugh nervously at Jeeter or feel sympathy for his relentlessly pathetic existence. Decades of readers such as Sylvia Jenkins Cook, however, have recognized that while the "suffering and degeneracy of [Caldwell's] characters is virtually irremediable," his narrative of the successive catastrophes of these... |
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| Essay on A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell |
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| A Time to Be Born by Dawn Powell Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Dawn Powell apparently conceived A Time to Be Born in fall 1940, as a diary entry for October 29 contains preliminary notes for the novel's opening meditation (Diaries, 182). Powell started writing the novel in January 1941 and completed it in May 1942 (Diaries, 196, 200). Sometime in 1941, Powell wrote a synopsis for Scribner's (Selected Letters, 112-13), which published the novel in August 1942 (191). The title was taken from Ecclesiastes (Selected Letters, 112), projecting the novel's portrayal of "a time to love" and "a time of war" (3:1-8). Scribner's advertised the novel in Publishers' Weekly (June 20, 1942) as "amusing, witty, slightly mad, romantic, pungent"... |
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| Essay on Thunder Horse by Peter Bowen |
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| Thunder Horse by Peter Bowen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Thunder Horse is the fifth and, arguably, most distinguished of Peter Bowen's Montana mysteries featuring the Deputy and amateur sleuth Gabriel Du Pre. (By 2005, 12 of Bowen's Du Pre books had been published.) A hard-drinking, coarse-mannered, middle-aged Mitis Indian, Du Pre dominates all the books' narratives, using legal and not so legal means to get to the bottom of local mysteries. In Thunder Horse, after a significant earthquake, a Berkeley academic, Palmer, is found shot dead near Toussaint, a remote, rural, rugged part of Montana. The death coincides with the inexplicable desire of some Japanese businessmen to dig ponds for recreational fishing in the lightly populated... |
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| Essay on A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley |
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| A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Although Jane Smiley published numerous earlier works, including the novellas Ordinary Love and Good Will (1989) and the well-received novella and story collection The Age of Grief (1987), A Thousand Acres became Smiley's most acclaimed work, having earned both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1991. The film version, starring Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer, was released in 1997. The novel is a feminist retelling of the King Lear tale set on an Iowa family farm at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, a time of increasing farm foreclosures and economic shifts. The farm's patriarch, Larry Cook, decides to retire and turn... |
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| Essay on This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff |
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| This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Many critics have believed that Tobias Wolff's memoir of his life from age 10 until age 16 should really be termed a novel, because of its literary qualities. The story begins in 1955, as he and his mother drive from Florida to Utah, fleeing her abusive boyfriend, singing, and dreaming of a better life in the West. When the boyfriend traces them to Salt Lake City, they again flee, arriving in Seattle by luck of the Greyhound schedule. There, Toby falls in with boys who smoke, steal trinkets from the local merchants, and commit minor acts of vandalism. After he is suspended for writing an obscenity on the boys' bathroom wall, his mother, desperate to prevent further trouble, sends him... |
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| Essay on The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett |
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| The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Thin Man is the last of the five detective novels published by Dashiell Hammett between 1929 and 1934. It is the only one not first serialized in Black Mask; begun in 1931 and finished in 1933, its gestation was far longer than that of any of its predecessors; after it, Hammett would publish only a couple of short stories. It is, therefore, the fifth and final act in Hammett's reinvention of the detective story. The hardboiled qualities that characterized the Hammett version of the detective story are still present: There are gangsters and gunshots, tough cops and speakeasies, wisecracks and beatings, predatory and unreliable women. But there is also a detective's wife... |
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| Essay on The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien |
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| The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Tim O'Brien writes articles, short fiction, memoir, and novels. While marketed as a novel by its publisher and called a "composite novel" (O'Gorman) by some critics, The Things They Carried can also be considered a short story cycle or even a fictionalized memoir attempting to convey some of the truths of the experiences of soldiers in Vietnam. Tim O'Brien, the author, is himself a Vietnam veteran, and Tim O'Brien is a central character in these stories--or chapters--set, for the most part, in Vietnam during the war. Does that imply that the work is a memoir merely cast as fiction? The stories slip back and forth in time, with characters resurfacing and plots becoming... |
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| Essay on Them by Joyce Carol Oates |
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| Them by Joyce Carol Oates Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When Oates received the National Book Award for this novel, it was the first major acknowledgment of her stature as one of the most significant American novelists and short story writers of her generation. them was Oates's fourth novel. Unlike the early work of other novelists that has seemed overvalued in retrospect, them has continued to be perceived as a remarkably mature work, exhibiting considerable technical invention and great thematic complexity. Still, it is a tribute to Oates's continuing development as a novelist that her achievement in them has not overshadowed her later work. In them, Oates synthesizes a variety of novelistic forms. The book is a naturalistic coming-of-age... |
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| Essay on Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston |
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| Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When Zora Neale Hurston's work was revived by authors and critics in the 1970s, her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was recognized as a classic. Not only is the main character, Janie, a strong African-American female protagonist, but she speaks in her own dialect with her own hardwon wisdom. Like many artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston expressed the desire for mobility, freedom, and voice. The beginning occurs not just at sundown, but after a death; however, this ending provides the protagonist with a new life. Throughout the narrative, Death is personified and brings transformation that is destructive as well as creative. In fact, each death... |
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| Essay on Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry |
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| Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Larry McMurtry's Terms of Endearment (1975) and its sequel, The Evening Star (1992), have been referred to as the "Aurora Greenway novels." In addition, some critics have referred to Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, and Terms of Endearment as McMurtry's "urban trilogy," distinguishing them from his first three novels--Horseman, Pass By (1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show--which in retrospect have then been described as his "rural trilogy." Interestingly, although it does not become the primary setting until The Last Picture Show, the town of Thalia is a secondary setting in the first two novels of the "rural trilogy"... |
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| Essay on Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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| Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In 1962 Andrew Turnbull wrote of F. Scott Fitzgerald, "He abused his talent, but he couldn't suppress it" (204). This terse fragment of the biographer's sentence neatly summarizes the years of work and revisions Fitzgerald put into the writing and rewriting of Tender Is the Night, a novel that evolved through five titles, nearly 20 drafts, and over 5000 manuscript pages. Fitzgerald's most acclaimed novel is, and likely always will be, The Great Gatsby. While Gatsby is a remarkable story of the Jazz Age and the brashness, ebullience, and eventual moral disintegration of the young Americans who lived it, Tender Is the Night is a thing apart. A number... |
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| Essay on The Temple of My Familiar Alice Walker |
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| The Temple of My Familiar Alice Walker Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In her novel The Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker weaves a remarkable tapestry of the human condition. Her earlier novels deal primarily with the sense of isolation felt by black women who "are trapped by circumstances and this entrapment is the result of their sense of powerlessness against the structure of the dominant society as well as the fact that they have little understanding of that structure" (Parker-Smith, 479). This novel broadens her scope; she sets out to analyze, dismember, rearrange, reassemble, and perhaps even repudiate the human psyche. It is all humanity that is trapped by circumstances; it is all humanity that no longer listens to its "familiar" nature... |
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| Essay on Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen |
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| Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published in 1961, the novella Tell Me a Riddle, the longest story in the collection also called Tell Me a Riddle, recounts a poignant story of an old couple, Eva and David. Married for 47 years, David feels empty inside and tries in vain to persuade Eva to sell their house and join him at a home for old people. Eva finds no other pleasure than staying at her home to do what she has failed to do over the past decades. She is disheartened to realize that their house has been sold and still insists on going home. Neither David nor some of her children understand her until she is diagnosed with cancer. Eva, in her songs about the past, expresses her remembered happiness as well as her... |
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| Essay on Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs |
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| Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The first of 26 novels in a series, Tarzan of the Apes was first serialized in All-Story Magazine in 1912. Incorporating Burroughs's own views of heredity and environment, his Tarzan is an orphaned, aristocratic English lord raised by apes who combines the physical strength of his jungle home with the intelligence of his "noble blood." Tarzan possesses a remarkable physical and intellectual prowess, but exhibits a vulnerability that derives from the tentativeness of his identity. In contrast to the popular image of a grunting apeman, Tarzan can read English and can speak both English and French as well as animal languages. By the end of the series, he has... |
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| Essay on Suttree by Cormac McCarthy |
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| Suttree by Cormac McCarthy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Suttree, published as Cormac McCarthy's fourth novel, is a masterpiece, a book that Hal Crowther says will be regarded in the future as "a benchmark of literacy," just as The Sound and the Fury is now (37). Suttree combines a picaresque plot and structure with profound social, psychological, and spiritual themes narrated in an extreme style that John Ditsky observes "simply goes beyond Faulkner" (2). Written in the genre of the Southern grotesque, this novel represents the culmination of McCarthy's Southern works before he began exploring the western genre in such best-selling novels as All the Pretty Horses. Like McCarthy's other early works, Suttree shares an Appalachian setting... |
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| Essay on Sundown by John Joseph Mathews |
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| Sundown by John Joseph Mathews Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Scholars of Native American literature point to the period beginning in the late 1960s and diminishing somewhat in the 1980s as a time of rising popular and critical attention paid to fiction and poetry written by Native Americans. Kenneth Lincoln, in his groundbreaking book of the same name, dubbed this period the Native American Renaissance, which is generally perceived as beginning with N. Scott Momaday's winning of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. Other writers followed, including James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko, both writing about contemporary Native American issues while also turning toward traditional Indian methods of storytelling while forming their written works... |
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| Essay on Summer by Edith Wharton |
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| Summer by Edith Wharton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Edith Wharton published her 10th novel, Summer, in 1917. Like many of Wharton's other novels, Summer was adapted by Charles Gaines into a television film in 1981, starring Diane Lane as Charity Royall, while John Cullum played Lawyer Royall. As one of Wharton's New England novels, Summer both takes on and twists the tradition many critics call a seduction-and-abandonment plot. It follows Charity as she seeks independence from her guardian, Mr. Royall, while coming of age in the small town of North Dormer. The story traces the tension created by the young woman's questionable past linked to the nearby, derelict mountain folk and her increasing interest in the visiting city boy, Lucius Harney... |
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| Essay on Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell |
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| Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy occupies a bizarre place in modern literary opinion; some readily assign it a place among the American masterpieces of the 20th century (number 29 on the Modern Library's list of the century's greatest English-language novels), some see it primarily as fodder for critical attack, while few others in the general population and academic circles alike have even heard of the book or its author. The work was the prolific Farrell's first, in three volumes: Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgment Day (1935), the last published when he was only 31, chronicling the life of a lower-middle-class South Chicago male from his... |
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| Essay on The Street by Ann Lane Petry |
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| The Street by Ann Lane Petry Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Unlike other naturalistic novels of this era, Petry's portrait of Lutie Johnson, a young African-American woman who moves to Harlem in 1944 in order to provide a better life for herself and her son, does not constitute a one-sided piece of social criticism but a finely crafted work of art that depicts the entire range of possible responses to the realities of life in the streets of Harlem, a life between desire and despair. Lutie Johnson's hopes spring from her first contact with Ben Franklin's philosophy when she works as a maid for white employers in Lyme, Connecticut. Petry describes how creature comforts and consumer goods create artificial desires in Lutie Johnson, who naively... |
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| Essay on Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein |
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| Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Stranger in a Strange Land, first published in 1961, is Robert Heinlein's best-known novel, rivaled only by Starship Troopers (1959) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). The novel earned him his third Hugo Award for science fiction achievement and was the first science fiction novel to appear in the best-seller list of The New York Times Book Review. As with Heinlein's other well-known works, Stranger explores Heinlein's concerns with libertarian politics, mystical religious belief, and the relationship of individuals to society. Where Starship Troopers is sometimes interpreted as an endorsement of an authoritarian social order and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress... |
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| Essay on The Story of Avis by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps |
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| The Story of Avis by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Story of Avis depicts the plight of 19th-century women torn between personal self-fulfillment and marriage and suggests that overwhelming domestic duties ultimately destroy creativity. Although some early reviewers described the novel as having "a dangerous lesson to preach, and no less dangerous than untrue" and not "altogether a wholesome story," both a moral and a realistic dimension appear throughout. Avis Dobell, Phelps's favorite female character, is at least partially autobiographical. The numerous parallels between Avis and Phelps include an epiphanic reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and a dislike of domestic... |
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| Essay on Steps by Jerzy Kosinski |
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| Steps by Jerzy Kosinski Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The subject of Steps undergoes a continual metamorphosis throughout its pages. At the beginning of each of the 46 episodes into which the book is divided, an "older" self is negated (not canceled out entirely, but preserved in the memory of the work), and a "new" one forms and takes its place. Each self belongs to a "present" instant that is disconnected from the preceding series of instants, each of which is itself displaced from history. If a unified authorial consciousness embraces each transformation, holding together the death and reformation of the subject in each instance, this can only be discerned in the articulation of the individual episodes. And if a link binds the episodes... |
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| Essay on Staggerford by Jon Hassler |
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| Staggerford by Jon Hassler Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Who better to write a novel about an English teacher than one who has been involved in that career for most of his adult life? Jon Hassler makes clear that he fashioned some of Staggerford from his own life experience. ". . . my fiction is 37 percent autobiographical. I think Miles is 37 percent me, that is, about one third of him is like me and about one-third of his experience is mine" (Plut). It is precisely this willingness to look at his life and the lives of those around him as "story" that makes Hassler's fiction unforgettable. Readers know these people in their own lives. While some critics have argued that Miles Pruitt, Agnes McGee, and Beverly Bingham, the three central... |
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| Essay on A Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin |
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| A Spy in the House of Love by Anais Nin Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. A Spy in the House of Love (1954) is one of five volumes in Anais Nin's continuous novel series. This group of novelettes includes Ladders to the Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), Cities of the Interior (1959), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). The concept behind Nin's continuous novel is to show the complexity of simultaneous female experiences; together, the works trace the multiple aspects of sexual (and other) relationships encountered by Lillian, Djuna, and Sabina, portraying "women in a continuous symphony of experience" (Ladders, ix). This "experience" is related to the metaphor of the four disconnected chambers... |
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| Essay on The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner |
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| The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Seventy years old, crotchety, and suffering from arthritis, retired literary agent Joe Allston receives a postcard from Astrid Wredel-Krarup, the impoverished countess with whom he and his wife, Ruth, shared an apartment in Denmark 20 years earlier. Her message prompts him to dig out the journals he kept during their three-month stay, and when Ruth learns of their existence, she insists that he read them aloud to her. Their bedtime readings frame a gothic tale of political, social, and moral exile, Faustian genetic experiments, and incest. The tale unfolds over several winter evenings and is punctuated by daytime visits from a flamboyant Italian novelist, Allston's retired... |
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| Essay on Southern Discomfort by Rita Mae Brown |
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| Southern Discomfort by Rita Mae Brown Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. While the theme of hypocrisy among the upper classes is certainly not new to works of literature, the way it is developed by the author determines whether it will become another cliched account of a society gone awry or a more refreshing view on the injustices we sometimes unknowingly perpetrate on ourselves and each other. Rita Mae Brown's Southern Discomfort chronicles two parallel societies over a period of 10 years in Montgomery, Alabama. The first, what we could call the "visible" society, is composed of the upper classes and the religious authority represented by moral crusader Reverend Linton Ray. In general, the visible society caters to the male, white... |
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| Essay on The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather |
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| The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Based in part on the life of the great Metropolitan Opera diva Olive Fremstad as well as on the author's recollections of growing up in Nebraska, Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark tells the story of Thea Kronberg, descendant of Swedish immigrants, who leaves her family in Moonstone, Colorado, to study music in Chicago and who eventually achieves a career as a world-famous Wagnerian singer. She accomplishes this with the encouragement, artistic vision, and financial support of five men: Dr. Howard Archie, the local Moonstone physician who regards her as a daughter; Professor Wunsch, her first music teacher; Ray Kennedy, a railroad brakeman who leaves her a legacy that... |
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| Essay on A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton |
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| A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. A Son at the Front is a political novel with a specific propagandist purpose. In 1907, Edith Wharton moved to France. During World War I, she visited the French front "from end to end" (Wharton 1915, 216), established three major charities (Price, 40, 48), and experienced bombardment personally at home in Paris (Wharton 1934, 357). It was a visit to a hospital at Chalons-sur-Marne for the French Red Cross that made her "feel the urgency of telling my rich and generous compatriots something of the desperate needs of hospitals in the war-zone" (Wharton 1934, 352). Her particular propagandist task was to engender knowledge of, and sympathy for, the Allies' cause among... |
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| Essay on So Far From God by Ana Castillo |
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| So Far From God by Ana Castillo Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. At the beginning of the novel, Sofia, the main character, embodies the figure of the surrogate mother and satisfying wife; she lives an uneventful family life until her youngest daughter dies. Surprisingly, the three-year-old girl, later referred to as "La Loca," wakes up in her coffin in the middle of her funeral, provoking a fright among the church congregation. From that moment on, Sofi changes her priorities in life, especially after her husband, Domingo, abandons her. Then she decides to take the reins not only of her house but of her business, the "Carne Buena Carneceria" (Good Meat Butchers). Her ambition later leads her to political power, becoming mayor... |
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| Essay on So Big by Edna Ferber |
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| So Big by Edna Ferber Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. So Big is the first in a series of regional novels for which Edna Ferber is well known, among them Showboat (1926), Cimarron (1930), Saratoga Trunk (1941), Come and Get It (1944), Giant (1952), and Ice Palace (1958). So Big won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1925, the highest level of critical acclaim that Ferber would receive in her career. So Big prefigures Ferber's later work in its regional subject matter, its themes of idealism and adversity, and its storyline of the indomitable woman who must face her future with no help from the men in her life. The novel is set in the fictional community of High Prairie, a fertile farmland community south of Chicago where first-generation Dutch... |
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| Essay on Snow White by Donald Barthelme |
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| Snow White by Donald Barthelme Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Postmodern in its sensibility, Donald Barthelme's prose has been noted for its "nonlinear narration, sportive form and cohabitation of radical fantasy with quotidian detail" (Barth, 3). His first of four novels, Snow White is an experimental work that utilizes subversive literary strategies to critique contemporary America. In his text, Barthelme parodies the fairy tale to such an extent that the familiar Grimm tale and its characters are barely recognizable. No longer is the title protagonist characterized by innocence, purity, and her desire to subscribe to fixed roles relegated to females in children's fables. The Snow White of Barthelme's story is creatively adventurous... |
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| Essay on Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut |
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| Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. It is a mixed blessing that Slaughterhouse-Five, the best-known of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s 14 novels, owes at least some of its notoriety to George Roy Hill's 1972 film adaptation. Although it cannot reproduce the novel's complex layers of fact and fiction, the film at least expanded the novel's potential audience beyond Vietnam-era college students and literary intellectuals. Right away the New York Times called the book "tough and very funny . . . sad and delightful," but at the same time it had been banned or even burned in North Dakota, Michigan, and Kentucky. Three decades later it came in at number 18 on the Modern Library's list of the 20th century's top 100 novels... |
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| Essay on Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser |
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| Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When Sister Carrie was first published in 1900, it was criticized and ultimately suppressed due to its "immoral" content. Today it is hailed by critics as an exemplar of American literary naturalism and a chronicle of turn-of-the-century capitalism and progress. As a journalist turned author, Theodore Dreiser's writing was strongly influenced by the French literary mode of naturalism that sought to make literature an objective and scientific study of human beings, exploring through characters how experience is shaped by a combination of heredity, environment, and chance. Dreiser translated these ideas into an American context, using the rapid growth of cities and consumerism... |
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| Essay on Show Boat by Edna Ferber |
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| Show Boat by Edna Ferber Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Near the end of Show Boat, heroine Magnolia Hawks Ravenal summarizes her life as well as the novel's plot: " 'What if I were to (say) that I used to be a show-boat actress, and that my father was drowned in the Mississippi, and my mother, at sixty, runs a show boat all alone, and that my husband is a gambler and we have no money, and that I have just come from the most notorious brothel in Chicago, where I returned a thousand dollars my husband had got there, and that I'm on my way to try to get work in a variety theatre?' She was smiling a little at a this absurd thought." Edna Ferber probably smiled too at the thought that Show Boat would make her rich and help make her name immortal... |
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| Essay on The Shipping News by Annie Proulx |
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| The Shipping News by Annie Proulx Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In The Shipping News, the protagonist, Quoyle, an awkward, unsuccessful, but tender-hearted man is described by the narrator as having "a great damp loaf of a body, [a] Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, [and a] monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face" (2). When Quoyle's parents die, he loses his job, and his unfaithful wife, Petal Bear, is killed in a car crash after selling their daughters to a child abuser, from whom they are rescued physically untouched. His stouthearted aunt convinces him to make a fresh start by moving from Upstate New York to his ancestral home in a remote coastal village in Newfoundland. In the rustic atmosphere of Killick-Claw... |
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| Essay on Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter |
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| Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools was published to elaborate fanfare on April 1, 1962, more than a quarter of a century after she had begun writing it. The initial reviews were almost unanimously laudatory, and Mark Schorer's analysis in the New York Times Book Review set the tone. Calling Porter's novel a "masterpiece" that would take its place among the best books of the century, he compared it with George Eliot's Middlemarch and James Joyce's Ulysses. Ship of Fools was an immediate best-seller, and film rights were quickly sold. Porter became a wealthy woman, and it looked as if her only long novel was going to enhance her already stellar reputation founded... |
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| Essay on The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles |
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| The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles mainly concerns itself with an American couple, Kit and Port, and their travels in Morocco. This first novel has a fairly straightforward plot but touches on the metaphysical in the style of writing and themes presented, representing the mysteriousness of the desert and the desert's similarities to the mysteries of the mind. In the beginning of the novel, Kit and Port are traveling with their friend Tunner. Since relations between Kit and Port have been a little rocky, Tunner tries to insinuate himself into a relationship with Kit. Port and Kit move to a different town without Tunner, and Port falls ill with typhoid. Before he dies, he... |
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| Essay on The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick |
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| The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Cynthia Ozick's novella The Shawl provides a powerful commentary on the nature of trauma and its aftermath, the balance between memory and forgetting, and the limitations and possibilities of language. Taking the reader to hell (the Holocaust) and back again (Miami), The Shawl culminates in a vision of reintegration and hope. A prominent Jewish-American writer of novels, essays, poems, and short stories, Ozick is not herself a Holocaust survivor: "I did it because I couldn't help it. It wanted to be done. . . . I wasn't there, and I pretended through imagination that I was" ("Imagination"). This ambivalence manifests in an ongoing tension between speech and silence. The two... |
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| Essay on A Separate Peace by John Knowles |
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| A Separate Peace by John Knowles Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. An immediate critical and financial success after its publication (in London, 1959, and New York, 1960) and winner of the William Faulkner Foundation Award, A Separate Peace continues to mesmerize readers as the timeless tale of a boy's initiation into the hostile, often ugly, world of adult reality. This enduring bildungsroman has been compared to such classics as Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Through an artistic manipulation of character, setting, and both mythic and Christian symbol, John Knowles moves his novel's young characters from the tranquil summer of adolescence... |
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| Essay on Sent For You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman |
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| Sent For You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, form the backdrop for many of John Edgar Wideman's novels as well as much of the author's life. Wideman was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in Pittsburgh, and then earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor of philosophy degree at Oxford University. He has written numerous essays, short stories, and novels. Sent for You Yesterday, the third novel of the Homewood trilogy, won the P.E.N./Faulkner Award in 1984 as the best work of fiction published the previous year. Sent for You Yesterday opens with a nightmare about being trapped in a boxcar... |
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| Essay on Seize the Day by Saul Bellow |
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| Seize the Day by Saul Bellow Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Saul Bellow's novel (or more properly novella) Seize the Day may, at first glance, appear rather a slight tale. It is an account of just one day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, 40-something and down on his luck, living at the Hotel Gloriana in New York's Upper West Side. However, this is a day of reckoning for Wilhelm in which, at the instigation of his friend, the enigmatic Dr. Tamkin, he takes a gamble in speculating in the commodities market and ends up losing all. And this is just one more failure in a catalogue of failures in his life, all mercilessly exposed in the course of the narrative. We see, for instance, his wholly unsatisfying relationship with his father--a retired doctor... |
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| Essay on The Sea-Wolf by Jack London |
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| The Sea-Wolf by Jack London Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published only a year after The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf became Jack London's second best-selling novel. While the novel exhibits the fiercely naturalistic tendencies of his earlier fiction, it primarily represents the ongoing conflict between materialism and idealism in London's own philosophy. He personifies this philosophical conflict in his protagonist, Humphrey Van Weyden, an effete idealist who is impressed onto a pelagic sealing voyage and must fend for himself and adapt to the ship's brutal, masculine environment. Throughout the novel, Van Weyden clashes with the novel's antagonist, Wolf Larsen, a tyrannical sea captain who repeatedly asserts his materialist philosophy... |
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| Essay on The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison |
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| The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. With another fictional exploration of female sexuality and the power and pain it weaves, The Seal Wife, Kathryn Harrison's fifth novel, brings forth characters from another time, place, and culture while focusing on the psychological and sexual issues of solitude and obsession still palpable today. With prose as pure as the ice-covered Alaskan territory she re-creates, Harrison opens the door for not only her written work but also the controversy and resonance that often accompanies it. While Harrison's writing has consisted primarily of novels, among them Thicker Than Water, Exposure, Poison, and The Binding Chair or, a Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society, it is her... |
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| Essay on The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne |
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| The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Scarlet Letter is a historical novel of Puritan New England in which the story of the central character, Hester Prynne, is introduced with images of prison. At the beginning of the novel, we encounter a jail door with decorative red ironwork that anticipates the flourishes of Hester Prynne's scarlet badge. This theme of entrapment is prevalent throughout the novel. Later, Hester's husband Chillingworth observes that their marriage was one of youth and decay, an "unnatural relation," but Hester's unnatural relation with decay extends beyond her marriage: She is painfully aware that she can no longer see or draw sustenance from her future. All tomorrows will... |
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| Essay on Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald |
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| Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Zelda Fitzgerald named her novel Save Me the Waltz from a title found in a Victor record catalog, according to Nancy Milford, in her biography of the author and famous wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda: A Biography. Zelda Fitzgerald wrote her novel in 1932, during a span of "no more than three months," while receiving psychiatric care at John Hopkins University Hospital. The writing served as part of her treatment. Fitzgerald sent a manuscript of the project to her husband's editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner, before allowing her husband to read her work--an act that created much suspicion and resentment. At the time, Scott Fitzgerald had been long at work on his... |
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| Essay on The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara |
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| The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. African-American author Toni Cade Bambara is perhaps best known for her short stories such as "Raymond's Run" and "The Lesson." After publishing two collections of short stories, Gorilla, My Love (1972) and The Seabirds Are Still Alive (1977), she turned to writing The Salt Eaters. An accomplished short story writer and novelist, her first love was film (Bambara, Deep Sightings, x). After making several films and documentaries, Bambara died in 1995. However, Bambara's estate published two posthumous works: a second novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), about the Atlanta child murders, and Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations (1996)... |
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| Essay on Salome of the Tenements by Anzia Yezierska |
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| Salome of the Tenements by Anzia Yezierska Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Sonya Vrunsky, in Salome of the Tenements, sees millionaire philanthropist John Manning as literally her savior: "But only let me work for you and you will save my soul" (2) she tells him. She means that his model tenement house and its support organizations will allow her to help her fellow Jewish immigrants to overcome their poverty. Sonya has her own ideas for helping the people in her community, but she believes that Manning's money and his method of teaching immigrants "skills" (including hygiene and elocution) will help them to advance themselves. But Sonya is attracted to the man himself, or so she thinks: Head swung back, Sonya looked up in... |
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| Essay on Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth |
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| Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Looking back over Philip Roth's prodigious output--27 books over a 45-year career--one can see noticeable shifts in narrative trajectory, or put another way, turning points in his novelistic focus. There is the comedic, and at times manic, flair of Portnoy's Complaint, which marked a radical departure from the more subdued realism found in earlier works such as "Goodbye, Columbus" and Letting Go. In The Ghost Writer, Roth begins his exploration of the artist figure and the ways in which art can determine destiny. And with The Counterlife, his postmodern tour de force, Philip Roth inaugurates a series of works that highlights the constructedness of identity as well as the inextricable... |
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| Essay on Ryder by Djuna Barnes |
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| Ryder by Djuna Barnes Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Djuna Barnes's first novel, Ryder, is unconventional in all the traditional aspects of fiction: plot, character, setting, narration. In fact, in her essay "A Reader's Ryder," Marie Ponsot observes that Ryder "is not a book that yields much to those who begin with a linear examination" (94); consequently, it is not an easy read for a person who sits down and anticipates the soothing and predictable structure of a bildungsroman. Contemporary readers are best advised to drop their expectations and simply enjoy the tour de force that Djuna Barnes has created. Evidently, readers needed no such instruction in 1928, when Ryder was first published; indeed, the novel enjoyed a... |
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| Essay on Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown |
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| Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. One of Rita Mae Brown's first attempts to have Rubyfruit Jungle published resulted, as she recalls in her memoirs, with a shocked editor throwing the manuscript at her: "You would have thought I'd tossed a canister of mustard gas into her office. She called me a pervert, telling me to get out of her office." After several more tries, a small feminist press finally took Brown's novel. The cause for such controversy was, undoubtedly, its open portrayal of lesbianism, and its protagonist's sincere and direct approach toward her own sexuality and her place in society. Molly's determination to define who she is and what she will become is at the heart of Rubyfruit Jungle... |
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| Essay on Rose of Dutcher's Coolly by Hamlin Garland |
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| Rose of Dutcher's Coolly by Hamlin Garland Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. "Rose was an unaccountable child from the start." With the first sentence of his novel, Garland forecasts Rose's eventual rebellion and escape from the limitations of western farm life, especially as those limitations affected women. In the following sentences and chapters, Garland constructs, with unparalleled skill and care, the lineaments of the "unaccountable" Rose Dutcher; she becomes the most physically and intellectually vibrant female character in his work, if not in all American fiction up to that time. (Eric Sundquist writes that it is only in the writings of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence that one can find an equal for Garland's "revelation of Rose's... |
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| Essay on The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty |
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| The Robber Bridegroom by Eudora Welty Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Robber Bridegroom, Eudora Welty's first piece of long fiction, is set in the frontier days of Mississippi's Natchez Trace. We overhear the beginning of the tale as it is told by Clement Musgrove to the mysterious stranger, Jamie Lockhart, who has just saved his life and who later kidnaps and seduces his daughter, Rosamond. Though much of Welty's later work makes use of myth, this novella teems with mythic, historical, and literary allusions. Sharing its title with a Grimm Brothers' story, The Robber Bridegroom's fairy tale quality is enhanced by the character Salome, who is in part the classic wicked stepmother and in part the evil seductress whose name she bears... |
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| Essay on A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean |
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| A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. "In the half century I taught literature, I was largely given the freedom to teach the literature of my choice, so naturally I chose literature that I felt was beautiful" (Maclean 1988, 69). Norman Maclean (1902-90) wrote the novella/memoir A River Runs Through It (1976) after retiring from the English faculty at the University of Chicago in 1973. It has become the best-known portion of his relatively small corpus of fiction and was made into a successful movie in 1992, directed by Robert Redford and starring Brad Pitt as Norman's brother, Paul Maclean. While the movie alters the plot romantically to feature Norman's courting of Jessie, his wife-to-be, they are already... |
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| Essay on The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells |
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| The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Of the nearly three dozen novels written by W. D. Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham has proved the most enduring. From its opening in 1875, a revealing interview of the 55-year-old Lapham in Boston provides information on his life to date: his background on a Vermont farm, his family, his crucial experience as an officer in the Civil War, his boorishness and lack of taste, his fortunate discovery of a mineral paint lode on his farm, and his rise to wealth manufacturing, obtrusively advertising, and selling the paint. The interview also exposes a point of vulnerability in that rise when Lapham self-consciously minimizes the role in it of his former partner... |
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| Essay on The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan |
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| The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The novels of Abraham Cahan, particularly his classic The Rise of David Levinsky, are foundation works in the emergence and development of Jewish-American literature. Indeed, The Rise of David Levinsky stands as one of the most important novels of immigrant experience in all American literature. In his examination of the immigrant experience in the new world of America, especially the pressures of assimilation and acculturation, Cahan highlights major themes that are returned to again and again in much Jewish-American literature of the 20th century. The Rise of David Levinsky is a multifaceted work as reflected in its literary history as a realist novel written... |
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| Essay on The Reef by Edith Wharton |
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| The Reef by Edith Wharton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Identified by many critics as the most autobiographical novel that Edith Wharton wrote, The Reef was praised by Henry James for its densely knit structure resembling classical drama. Narrated through the perspectives of its two characters, George Darrow and Anna Leath, the novel depicts Anna Leath's wavering emotions between accepting and refusing George Darrow's marriage proposal after discovering his brief affair with Sophy Viner. Darrow, an American diplomat in London, meets Sophy at Dover before crossing the English Channel. Darrow's pride is hurt by the curt and detached tone of the telegram he has received from Anna before he takes the train at Charing Cross. Anna is postponing, for... |
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| Essay on Red Dragon by Thomas Harris |
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| Red Dragon by Thomas Harris Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The objective of a detective thriller, and much of so-called "true crime" journalism for that matter, is to enchant the reader. The criminal and/or the detective, and certainly the blood that is shed, must be imbued with something akin to magic, but magic within the terms of everyday life and without recourse to the otherworldliness that characterizes fantasy. Retired F.B.I. agent Will Graham's capacity to "reconstruct" a murderer's thinking by tracing back from mere traces left at the scene of the crime is a magical capacity to the degree that his intuitive mind's eye renders those traces a scene of the crime: "Graham wondered if he [the murderer] had lit a candle. The flickering... |
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| Essay on Red Dragon by Thomas Harris » |
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| Essay on The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane |
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| The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. With its ironic and scornful tone, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage marked a significant departure from the heavily idealized Civil War fiction that appeared in the decades preceding its publication. The novel's unique tone and vivid imagery propelled its author to overnight success. Rather than portraying a larger historical view of the Civil War composed of epic battles that are fueled by a clash of ideals, Crane's focus is much narrower, in that he concentrates on the individual psychology of Private Henry Fleming. The novel impressionistically records Henry's shifting psychological state as he is transformed from a naive, vainglorious youth to an experienced... |
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| Essay on The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane » |
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| Essay on The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss |
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| The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Considered one of Auchincloss's finest works, The Rector of Justin purports to tell the life story of Francis Prescott, recently deceased headmaster of Justin Martyr Academy, a New England boarding school modeled on Groton, Auchincloss's alma mater in Massachusetts. On one level the novel may be viewed as an examination of the institution of the American private school. In the words of scholar David B. Parsell, as Justin Martyr Academy moves to center stage, the school becomes more than merely the setting of the novel: "Through the life, ambitions, and accomplishments of the fictional Frank Prescott, Auchincloss focuses directly upon the private boys' school as a sort... |
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| Essay on The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss » |
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| Essay on Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow |
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| Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Ragtime is a historical novel that mingles fact and fiction, while interweaving the stories of three different families. The title hints at the raggedy coexistence of different narratives within the novel: Doctorow wrote his novel like a ragtime, as though a syncopated melody line, one strand of history, is played against a straight or routine accompaniment, another strand. He plays history like a tune on a player piano. He has emphasized the importance of understanding history as a kind of ragtime throughout his career. He believes that fiction understands history's sources to be more various than the historian might suppose, and Ragtime illustrates his belief, as expressed in an interview... |
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| Essay on Rabbit, Run by John Updike |
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| Rabbit, Run by John Updike Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), the protagonist runs, but not too far. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a character Updike revisits in three subsequent novels, Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), and one novella, Rabbit Remembered (2000), is a 26-year-old married salesman and former star high-school athlete who literally runs out on Janice, his pregnant, alcoholic wife, and on Nelson, his two-year-old son. On his initial "flight from domesticity" (Kakutani, 1), Rabbit only travels as far as West Virginia before quickly returning to his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania. His freedom from entangled relationships is also short-lived. Soon thereafter... |
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| Essay on Rabbit Redux by John Updike |
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| Rabbit Redux by John Updike Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. John Updike's Rabbit Redux, published in 1971, is a sequel to his 1960 novel Rabbit, Run. The novel is set in a middle-class community in east Pennsylvania in 1969, a year highlighting quintessential events in the United States: the moon exploration, the Vietnam War, feminist movements, sexual and black revolutions, drug addiction, hippie lifestyles, and middle-American anger and frustration. The narrative successfully integrates the important social and political issues addressed by different characters in its representation of the arid urban life of the 1960s. The novel is divided into four sections named after the central figures thematizing certain concerns. Section One, "Pop/Mom/Moon,"... |
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| Essay on Rabbit Redux by John Updike » |
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| Essay on Quicksand by Nella Larsen |
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| Quicksand by Nella Larsen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Nella Larsen's largely autobiographical novel Quicksand, for which she won a Bronze medal as second prize in literature from the Harmon Foundation in 1928, is considered one of the finest novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Through the inability of its biracial heroine to find her identity in either African- or European-American communities, Quicksand depicts cultural dualism from both sociological and psychological perspectives. The third-person narration of the novel's plot is filtered through the consciousness of its 22-year-old heroine Helga Crane, daughter of a Danish mother and an African-American father. The novel opens with Helga on the verge of leaving her position as teacher... |
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| Essay on Pushing the Bear by Diane Glancy |
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| Pushing the Bear by Diane Glancy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Diane Glancy is a writer of Cherokee and German/English ancestry who is celebrated for the stylistic experiments of her prose and poetry. Writing poetry that reads like prose and prose that is pure drama, she mixes written and oral culture so that her texts move somewhere "between petroglyth and written language" (Claiming, 20). Glancy's award-winning books include her collections of poetry, Claiming Breath (1992) and The Relief of America (2000); drama, War Cries (1996) and American Gypsy (2002); and essays, West Pole (1997). These books are woven out of fragments of the past, collective and individual memories that often address a sense of loss and alienation... |
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| Essay on The Promised Land by Mary Antin |
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| The Promised Land by Mary Antin Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Mary Antin's novel-like autobiography, The Promised Land, first appeared in serialized format in The Atlantic Monthly in 1911. This story of a young Jewish girl's emigration from Russia and her adolescence in Boston was a best seller that fictionalized both the protagonist, clearly based on Antin herself, and some of her experiences. Antin also employed novelistic techniques that resulted in a spellbinding tale: Libraries reported it as the most requested book of the year, and special teacher manuals on the text were distributed for use in schools (Sollors, xxxii). The Promised Land remained one of the most popular and influential immigrant narratives for the first... |
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| Essay on The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain |
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| The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) entered a major phase of his career in the mid-1870s starting with the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and with his writing of the early chapters of its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As he worked on Huck, Clemens found himself struggling. His strategy was to set aside a book that was stalled to begin another. When he felt he had written himself out after the first 18 chapters of Huck Finn, Clemens turned to the story of the childhood adventures of Edward VI of England and his "twin," the pauper Tom Canty. That book became The Prince and the Pauper. The idea for the tale took root during 1877 while... |
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| Essay on A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving |
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| A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving's seventh novel, was published in 1989. Unlike his other novels, it does not contain Vienna, Bears, or rapes. However, like many of his other novels, the narrator and main character's name is Johnny. Johnny Wheelwright is plagued throughout his childhood and adolescence by not knowing who his biological father is. He is raised, for the most part, by his mother, Tabitha Wheelwright, and his grandmother. Owen Meany, a little person with an unusual voice (his dialogue is written in all capital letters), accidentally kills Johnny's mother when he hits a foul ball that strikes her head. Despite this tragedy, Owen and Johnny are best... |
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| Essay on The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown |
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| The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown is considered the first novel by an American-born writer in the United States. First published anonymously, The Power of Sympathy is an example of sentimental romance written in epistolary form. The letters illustrate a dialogue between Harrington and Worthy, two young men who both have a love interest; Harrington has fallen in love with Harriot, who is beautiful and virtuous, but poor and beneath Harrington's station in life, and Worthy is engaged to Harrington's sister, Myra. Myra and Harriot are also friends, and their exchange of letters communicates Harriot's dilemma of maintaining her virtue, even though... |
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| Essay on The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain |
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| The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Postman is the first and by far the most famous novel by this prolific and popular specialist in hard-boiled or "tough guy" fiction. The well-known plot was literally "torn from the headlines"--not for nothing did Edmund Wilson call James Cain and his school the "poets of the tabloid murder" (Wilson, 21). In 1927 Cain, then a successful newspaperman, followed with interest the sensational trial of one Ruth Snyder and her lover, Henry Judd Gray, who were eventually found guilty and executed for the murder of Snyder's husband. The case fascinated the media and the public: Snyder and Judd seemed to reflect the tenor of the times, the illusory promises... |
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| Essay on Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth |
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| Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Since the late 1980s, Philip Roth has been redefining himself as a novelist. Beginning with The Counterlife (1987), his postmodern tour de force, Roth's narratives have been increasingly ambitious and display an artistry that has far surpassed his earlier works. His autobiographical tetralogy--The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), and Operation Shylock (1993)--1995's Sabbath's Theater, and his American Trilogy, composed of American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), have earned him every major American literary award, not to mention an international standing as one the 20th century's most important novelists... |
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| Essay on The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver |
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| The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. This intricately structured, multivocal novel is at once an engrossing saga of an American missionary family and an important political allegory about the ethnocentricity with which the United States and Europe have historically approached Africa. Spanning roughly three decades, the novel begins in 1959, when Nathan Price, a domineering evangelical Baptist from Georgia, packs up his wife and four daughters and sets out to convert the heathen in what was then the Belgian Congo. Equipped with Bibles and Betty Crocker cake mixes, the Prices are repeatedly foiled in their attempts to transplant their lifestyle and worldview to a place with its own rich culture and... |
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| Essay on The Plot Against America by Philip Roth |
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| The Plot Against America by Philip Roth Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Although Philip Roth is one of the most significant American novelists writing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, his critical success has not always translated into book sales. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth's scandalous (for the time) and highly comic foray into male sexuality ruled the best-seller lists in 1969, but since then few of his novels have matched its "highly flammable," and popularly successful, combination of controversy and timeliness. That is, until The Plot against America in 2004. In Roth's most recent novel, an alternate history in which aviator hero Charles A. Lindbergh runs against the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and wins the presidency... |
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| Essay on Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion |
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| Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Joan Didion sets her second novel, Play It as It Lays, in Hollywood and on the freeway and desert surrounding it. The Los Angeles area serves less as a subject than as a background for exploring protagonist Maria Wyeth's depersonalizing experience of the Hollywood lifestyle popularized in movies and fiction. Unlike starlets who make it big in Hollywood, Maria leads a decidedly unglamorous life: She gets only bit parts acting; her four-year-old daughter, Kate, is hospitalized with some undefined condition demanding treatment with early forms of Ritalin; her marriage to filmmaker Carter Lang (who featured Maria in two of his films) is falling apart; and she illegally aborts... |
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| Essay on Plains Song: For Female Voices by Wright Morris |
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| Plains Song: For Female Voices by Wright Morris Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. For this, his final novel, Wright Morris received an American Book Award. Although many of his previous novels had featured female characters, most of those characters had been seen through male points of view or characterized largely by their effect on the men around them. Although Morris had typically taken some pains to make his female characters credible and complex, they had often seemed projections of male failure, frustration, or fantasy. Ranging from emasculating matriarchs to sexual playthings, these female characters would hardly appeal to feminist critics. So the publication of Plains Song, a multigenerational family saga told from multiple female points... |
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| Essay on Plains Song: For Female Voices by Wright Morris » |
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| Essay on Plainsong by Kent Haruf |
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| Plainsong by Kent Haruf Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Plainsong, by Kent Haruf, is a widely acclaimed, strong, and heartfelt novel of life in a rural farming and ranching town in western Colorado. The coming together of Haruf's original and fully realized characters creates a story sparsely but beautifully told of life in a remote and isolated small community. To a reader more accustomed to life in a big city with its multitude of social strife and urban problems, it may come as a surprise to find similar stress, pain, and coping mechanisms in a radically different environment. In the hands of another, less-accomplished author, this might have become a soap opera--or worse, a repetition of confessional stories we have all heard before. But Kent Haruf... |
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| Essay on Plagued by the Nightingale by Kay Boyle |
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| Plagued by the Nightingale by Kay Boyle Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Plagued by the Nightingale, written between 1924 and 1927 (Spanier, 57), published in 1931 in New York and republished in 1966 by Southern Illinois University Press, had long been considered Kay Boyle's first novel until Sandra Spanier discovered and published the 1924 manuscript Process in 2001. Plagued by the Nightingale takes its title from a 1923 poem by Marianne Moore quoted in context as the epigraph of the novel. Boyle omits the poem's title ("Marriage"), suggesting that her novel is an obscure meditation on the topic of marriage. It is that, and far more. Drawing on autobiographical material from her marriage to Frenchman Richard Brault, with whom she left for France... |
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| Essay on Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman |
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| Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police fired tear gas, water cannons, and automatic weapons, and dropped a satchel bomb upon a row of tenements on the 6200 block of Osage Avenue. Their target was a single row house, the home and headquarters of the MOVE Organization, an Afrocentric back-to-nature religious movement. After the smoke cleared from the bomb's resultant fire, 60 other homes had been destroyed, leaving more than 250 people homeless. Eleven MOVE members had been killed. Five were children. Five years later, John Edgar Wideman published Philadelphia Fire, his record-setting second PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel (his first was the 1984 Sent for You Yesterday). In this novel... |
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| Essay on The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster |
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| The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Two generations of children have now experienced the wondrously wacky world that young Milo found when he drove his tiny electric car through the little purple tollbooth that had mysteriously appeared in his bedroom. What elevates The Phantom Tollbooth--best categorized as an allegorical fantasy--to its place in the canon of children's literature is the fact that Juster kept his eye on the prize the whole time--he educated children without them realizing it. The result is that children continue to form a deep attachment to this book, this allegory on the development of the mind. Milo's journey becomes their journey. When Milo returns from his adventure, he is better... |
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| Essay on Pet Sematary by Stephen King |
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| Pet Sematary by Stephen King Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In 1980, during an interview with Abe Peck of Rolling Stone, Stephen King said of Pet Sematary: "It's done, but it's put away. I have no plans to publish it in the near future. It's too horrible. It's worse than The Shining or any of the other things. It's terrifying" (Underwood, 100). The idea for Pet Sematary came from a sequence of events from King's own life and began as any of his novels do, with a "what if" question. He planned to expand his idea into a modern retelling of W. W. Jacob's "The Monkey's Paw." During the writing, however, King said, "the book ceased being a novel to me, and became instead a gloomy exercise, like an endless marathon run. It never left my mind... |
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| Essay on People of Darkness by Tony Hillerman |
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| People of Darkness by Tony Hillerman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. It is not an overstatement to assert that the publication of Tony Hillerman's Navajo novels has been as significant to the history of the mystery-detective genre as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes and Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's popularization of the hard-boiled style through the novels and stories featuring Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, respectively. Before Hillerman's series, the multicultural contributions to the genre were anomalies, curiosities ranging from Earl Derr Biggers's immensely popular series featuring Charlie Chan, a generally benign caricature of the "Oriental" sensibility, to Arthur W. Upfield's long-running Australian... |
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| Essay on Penhally by Caroline Gordon |
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| Penhally by Caroline Gordon Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Released in 1931, Penhally--Caroline Gordon's first published novel--tells the story of four generations of the Llewellyn family and their lives on the great plantation of Penhally. Gordon divides the text into three sections and tells the story of the current generation in each section. Because Lucy and John's son--Frank--kills himself, Gordon gives us the story of his two sons--Nick and Chance--in the last section, thus encompassing the lives of the four generations. Within the text, one of the obvious concerns is that of land and the entailment of land to the firstborn male. Through her use of local color, Gordon develops the plot around Penhally, so much so that Penhally... |
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| Essay on Pembroke by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
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| Pembroke by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Much of the fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman invites feminist readings because her works deal with the struggles of women in patriarchal societies. However, Freeman's 1894 Pembroke resists a purely feminist reading primarily because of the negative portrayal of Deborah Thayer. Among the several rural New England households described in the novel, the father is generally the overbearing parent who stubbornly sticks to his "way" (11), thereby complicating the relationships of his children. The brothers-in-law Cephas Barnard and Silas Berry impose their own unreasonable will on their children, especially when it comes to their love interests. What prevents Pembroke from... |
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| Essay on Passing by Nella Larsen |
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| Passing by Nella Larsen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Following her achievement with her first two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing, Nella Larsen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930, becoming the first female African-American writer to receive this prize and establishing herself as the most promising writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Passing depicts the reencounter of two African-American girlhood friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who have not seen each other for 12 years. The entanglement of the two women's lives is unraveled by a third-person narrator, mostly through the eyes of Irene Redfield. The novel opens in the Redfields' New York home, where Irene receives a letter from Clare, to which she is disinclined to reply due... |
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| Essay on Paris Trout by Peter Dexter |
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| Paris Trout by Peter Dexter Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published in 1988, Paris Trout is the third and most celebrated of journalist Peter Dexter's five novels. Described as a "masterpiece" by one reviewer, it won the National Book Award and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Surprisingly, given its warm critical reception and best-seller status, scholars have for the most part ignored the novel, which was made into a movie in 1991. Set in the small town of Cotton Point, Georgia, in the 1950s, events develop around the title character, a psychotic 59-year-old white merchant who acts as a loan shark to local African Americans. The chronologically ordered third-person narrative begins with Trout's murder of a poor... |
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| Essay on Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov |
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| Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov's 14th novel (his fifth in English), is unlike almost any other novel written before or since. A reader, not knowing this was a novel, might at first mistake it for an annotated volume of poetry: Pale Fire presents itself as a previously unpublished, 999-line poem by the murdered poet John Shade, along with commentary by his sometime colleague, Charles Kinbote. There is also a scholarly introduction and a self-referential index to the "study." However, Shade and his family, Kinbote and his homeland of Zembla, and "Pale Fire" (the poem) are all really the creations of Nabokov. The foreword tells how the poem came into Kinbote's hands in the first place. Shade was... |
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| Essay on The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski |
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| The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Set for the most part in the eastern European countryside during World War II, The Painted Bird chronicles the largely nightmarish experiences of a young, dark-complexioned boy. His parents have sent him out of the city in which they have lived so that he might escape the Nazi persecution. Because the boy is never identified as Jewish and could very well be a gypsy, because he is never named, and because even the setting is never specifically identified, his seemingly singular, darkly fantastical passage to adulthood becomes, on many levels, emblematic of a whole generation's maturation under extraordinarily harsh conditions. The title of the novel refers to an ordinary bird... |
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| Essay on Paco's Story by Larry Heinemann |
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| Paco's Story by Larry Heinemann Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Paco's Story is Larry Heinemann's second Vietnam War novel, after Close Quarters, which was published in 1977. Both novels draw from Heinemann's 1967-68 tour of duty in Vietnam as a combat infantryman with the 25th Division. Paco's Story is one of the most significant fictional works on American experiences of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and the novel has garnered Heinemann lasting recognition and a number of awards, including the 1987 National Book Award. The opening introduces the reader to the novel's protagonist while he is still in Vietnam: A massive bombardment, probably "friendly fire," has devastated Alpha Company, and Paco is the only survivor. The reader follows... |
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| Essay on The Oxbow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark |
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| The Oxbow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. One of the most significant western novels of the 20th century, The Oxbow Incident made literary history with its groundbreaking style that many critics refer to as anti-Western or anti-romantic Western. Walter Van Tilburg Clark took all the ingredients of the familiar cowboy novel--the saloons, ranch hands, stagecoaches, and cattle rustling made familiar by such writers as Zane Grey Owen Wister, and Hamlin Garland--and invested his novel with a somber quality at once new to readers and essential to a realistic look at the settling of the American West. Implicit in the title is the irony of the novel's relation to the traditional novel of the region: The Oxbow Valley... |
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| Essay on The Outsider by Richard Wright |
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| The Outsider by Richard Wright Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Richard Wright's novel concerns Cross Damon, a proud and self-loathing man whose psychological impulses and radical personal philosophy have led him to a nihilistic alienation from basic social obligations and cultural presuppositions. Feeling oppressed and coerced by personal relationships and faced with the prospect of indebtedness and imprisonment, Cross is fortuitously involved in a subway train accident, which produces a corpse that is mistakenly thought to be his. "Embracing the opportunities" this affords him, he jettisons his identity, appropriates the name of a dead man, and initiates a number of ill-fated attempts to establish a new life: His repudiation of his ties... |
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| Essay on Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson |
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| Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In Our Nig, Harriet E. Wilson presents a hybrid form of writing that combines autobiography with traditional tropes from sentimental fiction and literary conventions from slave narratives. The title in its entirety, Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There, contains many clues that tell of the work's complexity and Wilson's own personal investment in the text itself. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., claims that "Harriet Wilson became most probably the first Afro-American to publish a novel in the United States, the fifth Afro-American to publish fiction in English (after Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown... |
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| Essay on Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote |
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| Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Truman Capote once claimed: "I always had a marked homosexual preference, and I never had any guilt about it at all. As time goes on, you finally settle down on one side or another, homosexual or heterosexual. And I was homosexual" (Clark, 63). Despite this cavalier and dubious assertion, Capote's fiction suggests a great deal of ambivalence about the role of homosexuality in art. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, presents homosexuality as a somewhat viable alternative to heterosexuality but does so in a setting where most of the characters have been deformed or paralyzed by love. Other Voices, Other Rooms is the coming-of-age story of Joel Harrison Knox... |
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| Essay on Ormond; Or the Secret Witness by Charles Brockden Brown |
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| Ormond; Or the Secret Witness by Charles Brockden Brown Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The second of what critics call Charles Brockden Brown's "four major novels," Ormond; or the Secret Witness was published in 1799. Along with Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (Part One, 1799; Part Two, 1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799), Ormond belongs to a body of work that makes Brown the most critically acclaimed of 18thcentury American literary writers. In addition to these novels, Brown wrote two sentimental novels--Jane Talbot (1801) and Clara Howard (1801)--essays, criticism, short stories, and served as editor of several magazines. For his entire body of work Brown is often described as "America's first professional man of letters"... |
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| Essay on Ormond; Or the Secret Witness by Charles Brockden Brown » |
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| Essay on The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman |
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| The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Francis Parkman (1823-93) was, in the words of one of his biographers, "the greatest writer among American historians." He is now best remembered as author of a massive seven-part history of France and England in North America (1865-84), which begins with the first French colonization of the new world and ends with the British conquest of New France in 1763. As this suggests, Parkman's great story, his contribution to what another historian has called "history as romantic art," was the interplay between the two rival colonial powers and a third force, the Native peoples, in North America. While still a young man, Parkman had decided on this project as his life's work, so... |
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| Essay on The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty |
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| The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In her last novel, The Optimist's Daughter, published first as a long short story in the New Yorker, Eudora Welty explores themes that are prominent in most of her works, such as the relationship between the individual and the community, the significance of place, and the relationship of the artist to society. In this work, the point-of-view character, a middle-aged female artist, comes to terms with the past after having left the South and her family behind. Laurel McKelva Hand, a widowed designer, lives in Chicago, where she had gone to college and married another artist. She seldom sees her family, even after the death of her mother leaves her elderly father on his own... |
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| Essay on The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty » |
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| Essay on O Pioneers! by Willa Cather |
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| O Pioneers! by Willa Cather Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Willa Cather's novel is a complex investigation into the supposedly ideal West and noble act of building America, through the telling of the story of a family that resists the cultural norms of that nation. When John Bergson dies and leaves his farm to his capable daughter, Alexandra, rather than his two other farmer sons Lou and Otto, or the too-young Emil, he goes against the patriarchal tradition of passing on the property to the male heirs. Granted, Lou and Otto still have rights to the land, but it is Alexandra who has the control of the farmstead. When other farming families, like the Linstrums, leave the area due to drought and poor harvest, Alexandra stays and works... |
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| Essay on O Pioneers! by Willa Cather » |
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| Essay on On The Road by Jack Kerouac |
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| On The Road by Jack Kerouac Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. On the Road is an outburst of youthful energy erupting from post-World War II American culture. Many veterans of the war and the American wartime homefront were looking for adventure and relief from the conformity of postwar prosperity and security. The rejection of this stasis is expressed in Kerouac's novel. Indeed, the ethos of freedom found in On the Road became the pattern for a generation of young, bohemian Americans; the novel became an expression of the spirit, which formed a generation of blue-jeans-clad hitchhiking bohemians looking to find an alternative to the constricting culture of the late 1940s and the 1950s. The novel is a study of Dean Moriarty, the wild, yahooing... |
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| Essay on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey |
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| One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published in 1962, Ken Kesey's first novel depicts the struggle for power within a mental-hospital ward between a newly admitted inmate, Randall Patrick McMurphy, and the woman in charge, Nurse Ratched. As told through the perspective of Chief Bromden, a half-Indian inmate who believes that Ratched and her staff are members of a nationwide conspiracy that controls the inmates through hidden machinery and implanted wires and circuits, the story details the transformative effect of McMurphy's nonconformist attitude on the disheartened male patients. In contrast to Ratched's passive-aggressive methods of therapy, which psychologically cripple the inmates... |
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| Essay on Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus |
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| Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In his first book, Allan Gurganus attempts a monumental task: not only to tell the story of his narrator, 99-year-old Lucy Marsden, the oldest living Confederate widow, but also to recount, through Lucy, a multiplicity of other stories: that of Lucy's much older husband, William More Marsden; that of Castalia, a former slave; even that of the South as a whole, ripped apart by the Civil War and a very long time healing from that wound. The resultant story is as long as it is ambitious. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All takes as its subject the history of the American South and merges a historical narrative with the imagination of fiction... |
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| Essay on Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear by Katharine Weber |
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| Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear by Katharine Weber Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Katharine Weber explores the distinctions between reality and perception in her debut novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. Harriet Rose, a photographer fascinated by reflections, realizes she holds a distorted image of her best friend, Anne Gordon. Harriet tends to project her values and desires onto those around her. Throughout the book, she struggles with a dilemma: Should she try saving Anne from the clutches of a toxic relationship? The novel ponders whether one can rescue somebody who does not ask to be saved. The novel was honored as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year. It was also listed under... |
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| Essay on Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear by Katharine Weber » |
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| Essay on Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes |
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| Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The story of a young boy's awakening to the realities of black life in a small Kansas town in the 1920s, Not Without Laughter is Langston Hughes's first and most highly acclaimed novel. Hughes, an American poet and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, wraps his narrative in dialect and jazz rhythms to convey the tempo and rich complexity of African-American life in this story of race, family, music, religion, and coming-of-age. Winner of the Harmon gold medal for literature, Not Without Laughter was published the year after Hughes's college graduation, when he was 28. Not Without Laughter tells the story of Sandy Rodgers, a young boy growing up in the fictional town of... |
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| Essay on No-No Boy by John Okada |
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| No-No Boy by John Okada Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. John Okada's No-No Boy is recognized as the first Japanese-American non-autobiographical novel. Written in the 1950s, the novel is concerned with the very real division and trauma created within the Japanese-American community in the aftermath of their internment by the U.S. government during World War II. Rather than focusing on internment camp experiences as many autobiographies do, the novel follows the return of a young Japanese American, Ichiro Yamada, to his hometown of Seattle after he has been imprisoned for refusing the draft to fight for the Americans during the war. The novel follows his painfully thwarted attempts at reintegration into the Japanese-American community... |
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| Essay on Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone |
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| Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Though Nisei Daughter is Monica Sone's only known published work, it has become perhaps the best-known memoir of the World War II Japanese-American internment. Originally published in 1953 by Little, Brown, the University of Washington Press resurrected it in 1979 at the height of the Japanese-American redress movement. The 1979 edition, which includes a preface by the sociologist S. Frank Miyamoto and a preface by Sone herself, has undergone numerous reprintings. Sone is married with several children and grandchildren and lives in Ohio. Because of its accessible language and detailed realism--and, perhaps, its humor and nonconfrontational style--Nisei Daughter... |
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| Essay on Nightwood by Djuna Barnes |
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| Nightwood by Djuna Barnes Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Djuna Barnes worked as a freelance journalist, illustrator, and artist in New York City in the 1920s. She garnered fame as a journalist who involved herself in "action pieces": sliding down ropes with firemen, force-fed like suffragettes on hunger strikes struggling to gain the vote. When she moved to Paris in 1919, she met many of her most important influences, such as James Joyce. While in Paris she joined the salon that met at Natalie Burney's home. There they studied the work of the Greek poet Sappho and critiqued each other's work. This circle is parodied, with Burney's blessing, in Barnes's Ladies Almanack. This is but one example of her thinly veiled fictionalization... |
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| Essay on The Night Travellers by Elizabeth Spencer |
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| The Night Travellers by Elizabeth Spencer Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In The Night Travellers, a Vietnam War novel set in North Carolina and Canada, Spencer revisits two of her common themes, the tensions between parents and children and the tensions between the artist and her community--conflicts that Spencer says she experienced in her own life. The individual parent-child relationships in this novel symbolize the country's, or fatherland's, interactions with the generation of youth who came of age during the Vietnam War. Though it is a young man, Jefferson Blaise, who actually protests and is later sent to the war, the main characters are Kate Harbison, a beautiful scientist who longs for a more glamorous life, and her daughter Mary Kerr... |
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| Essay on The Night Travellers by Elizabeth Spencer » |
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| Essay on Nights by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) |
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| Nights by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Nights presents itself as the last work of fiction by a female author who has committed suicide, with a prologue by a male acquaintance. Hovering over the novel, but never unambiguously answered, is the question, why has Natalia Saunderson killed herself by skating into the middle of a mountain lake? In one sense, H.D.'s novel is about the tension between the need for rational explanation and the truths of the creative unconscious. Nights is also a psychoanalytic novel--not only is Freud (Dr. Frank) and psychoanalysis mentioned throughout, but H. D. wrote the two parts shortly before and after her own analysis with Freud in 1933-34. Yet the novel is not a fictionalization of Freudian... |
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| Essay on Night by Elie Wiesel |
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| Night by Elie Wiesel Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The autobiographical novel Night stands alongside Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl as a crucial Holocaust memoir. While Frank's Diary is set before she reaches the concentration camps, Night chronicles the horror of the camps themselves, as seen through the eyes of 15-year-old Eliezer. Ellen S. Fine explains that the title of the book "encompasses the overall Holocaust landscape--a world synonymous with methodical brutality and radical evil. . . . Wiesel uses the word 'night' throughout his writing to denote this strange sphere, unreal and unimaginable in its otherworldliness." It is a short book, terse and lean. According to the scholar Simon P. Sibelman, Night is an example... |
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| Essay on Night by Elie Wiesel » |
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| Essay on The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster |
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| The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Comprised of three distinct, yet eerily related novellas--City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room--Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy reworks, rewrites, and rethinks the genre of the traditional American detective novel. Deconstructing not only the form of the detective genre, but also conventional notions of character, plot, and development, the three works collected in The New York Trilogy interrogate the acts of reading and writing just as much if not more so than the characters under surveillance within the text. As Bernd Herzogenrath notes: "The 'common denominator' of these novels is the fact that they are all 'rewritings,' that is, that they dwell... |
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| Essay on Neuromancer by William Gibson |
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| Neuromancer by William Gibson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Gibson's quest romance put cyberspace on the literary map and made cyberpunk a vehicle for the entry of postmodern sensibility into mass consciousness, once films and comic books had appropriated its plotlines, character types, iconography, vocabulary, and themes. If Neuromancer is a neural romance in which an emblematic hero's search to retrieve an object of ultimate value is played out on and in the nervous system, its plot and tonal register, as well as many of its characters, nevertheless derive from older, hard-boiled detective fiction and its cinematic equivalent, film noir. The world-weary, hard-bitten private eye who, caught between the cops, the crooks, and the femme... |
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| Essay on The Natural by Bernard Malamud |
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| The Natural by Bernard Malamud Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Bernard Malamud's first novel continues to find new audiences in courses ranging from Middle Age mythology, Jewish-American writing, the modern novel, baseball history, to film studies. Despite its variety of contexts, the majority of The Natural's criticism focuses on its complex configuration of myth and archetype. Led by influential essays from Leslie Fiedler and Earl Wasserman, this line of interpretation explores Malamud's incorporation of legends of Arthurian knights, the Fisher King, and the quest for the Holy Grail into the tradition of baseball in America. Malamud establishes Roy Hobbs as a modern-day Percival, the country yokel who becomes enamored of the idea... |
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| Essay on Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee |
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| Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Native Speaker, published in 1995, is Chang-Rae Lee's first novel. It met with acclaim and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the American Library Association Notable Book of the Year Award. It was also a finalist for the PEN West Award. The Voice Literary Supplement referred to the book as a "work of tremendous grace and discomforting resonance." Author Gish Jen described it as "beautifully crafted, enlightening, and heart-wrenching." To the New York Times Book Review, Native Speaker is a "tender meditation on love, loss, and family," whereas the Los Angeles... |
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| Essay on Native Son by Richard Wright |
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| Native Son by Richard Wright Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Considered by many to be Richard Wright's central work, Native Son carefully triangulates art, politics, and sociology in an attempt to illuminate an apparently hidden structure of American society. Wright, himself a member of the Communist Party, articulates an issue much bigger than an individual character, an issue at the very heart of a white capitalistic society. The novel's perceived Marxist attack on American cultural roles fueled an emotional controversy when it was first published in 1940, but it still finds resonance in the reading public today. The novel is divided into three sections: Fear, Flight, and Fate, each corresponding to the plight of the main character Bigger...
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| Essay on Narrow Rooms by James Purdy |
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| Narrow Rooms by James Purdy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. James Purdy's career has extended over half a century. He has produced notable work in four genres--the novel, the short story, drama, and poetry. Taken together, this work constitutes a significant contribution to American literature in the post-World War II period. After producing a series of novels and stories that, despite their idiosyncratic content and style, seemed readily classifiable as existential fables (Malcolm, 1959), neorealistic character studies (The Nephew, 1961), and acerbic satires on contemporary culture (Cabot Wright Begins, 1964), Purdy began to produce much more technically and thematically challenging works that critics initially tried to classify as... |
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| Essay on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe |
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| The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Edgar Allan Poe's only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, remains, as Frederick Frank observes, the "current Bermuda Triangle in Poe studies" (Frank, 117). Although Frank offered this comment in 1981, continuing critical debates and book-length surveys of the critical history of this novel testify to its impenetrable vortices of meaning. More recently, this novel has been described as one that "prefigures the spiritual dilemma that now conditions our reading of the protagonist's struggle against meaninglessness" (Kennedy, 13); is historically "beset by controversy in almost every particular" (Farrell, 214); and reveals what can happen when readers... |
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| Essay on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe » |
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| Essay on The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri |
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| The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her short story anthology, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri has now published her first novel, The Namesake. Like her earlier work, the text tells the story of first- and second-generation Bengali Americans and has received critical acclaim. The reason for its success could be that Lahiri is among the latest American writers to tell the nation's unfolding story in a revealing and refreshing way. Writing from a lesser-known perspective--she sees herself as part of a literary minority (Bahadur)--she focuses on character and individual lives in The Namesake, while recording the ethno-cultural changes to American society since... |
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| Essay on Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs |
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| Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Naked Lunch is not a conventional novel by either current or historical standards. Although coherent ideas run through some of its various sections, Burroughs's burlesque treatments of the general concept of addiction appear as a series of "routines," vignettes that are not necessarily connected thematically, although a reader may make connections as one might in sequences of dreams or nightmares. Therefore, reading Naked Lunch demands some unconventional habits from an audience. Burroughs himself suggests that the book can be picked up and read at any point between its covers. In a letter to the poet Allen Ginsberg dated October 28, 1957, Burroughs wrote of the developing manuscript... |
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| Essay on The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer |
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| The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Norman Mailer's first published novel, The Naked and the Dead, tracks the movements of a reconnaissance platoon stationed on the fictional island of Anopopei in the Pacific theater of World War II. In Norman Mailer Revisited, Robert Merrill notes that Mailer volunteered for the reconnaissance division during his time in the service between 1944 and 1946. Because Mailer had already written a "short novel that can only be considered a trial run for The Naked and the Dead," Merrill suggests that Mailer used his war experience as a background for the novel he had already envisioned, warning against reading the novel as a "transcription" of events of the war (Merrill, 12)... |
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| Essay on The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer » |
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| Essay on My Next Bride by Kay Boyle |
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| My Next Bride by Kay Boyle Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Although the author's note to My Next Bride states that "the characters in this novel are entirely fictitious, and have no reference whatsoever to real people, living or dead," Kay Boyle's fourth novel is an autobiographical retelling of her own 1928 experiences at Raymond Duncan's Grecian colony in the Neuilly suburb of Paris. Victoria John (Boyle's character) arrives in Paris from Montreal, Canada, looking for work. Renting a room in a run-down boarding house, she shares an impoverished lifestyle with two older Russian noblewomen, Miss Fira and Miss Grusha. It is her troubled financial situation that takes Victoria to work at Sorrel's (Duncan's) commune, where she is fed, paid to work... |
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| Essay on My Next Bride by Kay Boyle » |
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| Essay on My Antonia by Willa Cather |
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| My Antonia by Willa Cather Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Narrated by Jim Burden as a memoir of his childhood and early youth in the prairies, Willa Cather's My Antonia centers on the life of the pioneers in the wild borderland of Nebraska in the late 19th century. Jim's memories are constructed around a pivotal character, Antonia Shimerda, one of the children of Bohemian immigrants who settle in the area at the same time that Jim, an orphan, arrives at his grandparents' farm. Thus, both children begin their lives in Nebraska by having to face the harshness of life in the prairie. Jim's position is a privileged one--his grandparents are long-established farmers--but the Shimerdas live in misery and need their neighbors' help. Given this context... |
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| Essay on The Music of Chance by Paul Auster |
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| The Music of Chance by Paul Auster Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In The Music of Chance, Paul Auster's examination of the postmodern theme of self-willed solitude does not end in purposelessness. Although Auster uses a recurrent motif of the inheritance that alters the daily routine for the main character, and the gradual squandering of the money until the character is left with nothing, the true subject of the novel is freedom. Through Jim Nashe, Auster questions the American notion of freedom: the impulse to risk everything at a drop of a card. By the end of the novel, as Nashe clears his mind, his notion of freedom changes. Although Nashe is trapped in a rigidly determined manufactured system, he has transcended everything he had been... |
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| Essay on Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed |
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| Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. African-American novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, activist, anthologist, and--perhaps most important--satirist, Ishmael Reed has a literary career that spans several decades and several genres. He has published nine novels as well as several poetry and essay collections. He created several publishing companies, including the respected Before Columbus Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting multicultural, multiracial voices in American literature. Among these accomplishments, Mumbo Jumbo, his third novel, is widely considered his masterpiece. He currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and resides in Oakland, California. Mumbo Jumbo is a challenging intertextual... |
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| Essay on Mrs. Spring Fragrance by Sui Sin Far |
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| Mrs. Spring Fragrance by Sui Sin Far Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Edith Maude Eaton, born to an English painter and his Chinese wife, wrote Mrs. Spring Fragrance and other fiction, articles, and autobiography under the Cantonese pseudonym Sui Sin Far. She grew up in the United States and Canada, where she had less contact with her Chinese heritage and society's racial biases than readers might expect, perhaps because her features were Caucasian. Her initial view of Chinese immigrants was negative, but she quickly grew to use her writing to counter negative stereotypes of her mother's ancestry. Mrs. Spring Fragrance, collected with other writings and republished in 1995, was her only book publication, perhaps, in part, because she died at age 49... |
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| Essay on Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell |
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| Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. These novels are two halves of one story, the domestic history of an upper-middle-class family in Kansas City, Missouri, during the years between World War I and World War II. Rather than being a continuous narrative, the Bridge books consist of a series of loosely connected vignettes, episodes that reveal in a small space a great deal about the outer and inner lives of the characters. Many of the same events occur in both books but are refracted through the very different minds of husband and wife. Walter Bridge is a respected lawyer, a pillar of the community, a man who insists on keeping up appearances but who has "not yet believed a single thing only because it was believed... |
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| Essay on Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell » |
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| Essay on The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald |
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| The Moving Target by Ross Macdonald Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Moving Target is the first of 18 Lew Archer novels published between 1949 and 1976. Before The Moving Target, Kenneth Millar had published four crime and suspense novels under his own name, each featuring a different protagonist. In those books he had shown himself to be a student of the Dashiell Hammett-Raymond Chandler tradition; now, writing as Ross Macdonald, he would make a claim to be their heir, a successful claim in the eyes of many critics. Macdonald's great achievement, however, consists more in the 18-novel series (there are also nine Lew Archer short stories) than in any single novel. It is a series characterized by consistently sharp observation of lives and... |
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| Essay on The Moviegoer by Walker Percy |
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| The Moviegoer by Walker Percy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In Walker Percy's award-winning novel, The Moviegoer, it can be argued that the main character is not an individual but an emotion-state, despair, a sickness of the spirit and the self. Percy sets the stage for his existential novel with a quotation from Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death: "the specific character of despair is precisely this: that it is unaware of being despair." Despair is inescapable, inevitable--the abyss that threatens to devour humanity and from which the authentic self must be retrieved. John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling is Percy's "moviegoer," a 29-year-old small-time suburban New Orleans stockbroker. Binx squanders his time and potential in... |
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| Essay on The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford |
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| The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford's second novel, was published in 1947. Composed for the most part in Maine at a time when Stafford's marriage to Robert Lowell was disintegrating, it is a highly symbolic study of adolescence and tragic coming-of-age. Spare, taut, told in nine chapters of psychological intensity, the novel evokes the alterations and developments in such childhood emotions as feeling out of place; considering oneself a misfit; hating one's parent; hating oneself; and experiencing jealousy, isolation, sexual stirrings, lust for scandal, and the desire to kill or mutilate. Stafford returned throughout her writing life to the topic of childhood and chose to title her 1953... |
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| Essay on The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford » |
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| Essay on The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton |
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| The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. After its publication in 1925, The Mother's Recompense received a number of misreadings to which Edith Wharton responded on different occasions. Edith Wharton noted that the readers had failed to understand the unhappy ending of the novel, had misunderstood "the mother's recompense," and had not noticed the epigraph "desolation is a delicate thing" to the novel. If the reviewers in Wharton's time had not done justice to the novel, some critical works of modern times would have made Wharton equally uneasy. Elizabeth Ammons and Louis Auchincloss contend that The Mother's Recompense is nostalgic of the old standards and that Wharton was conservative. Such a conclusion... |
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| Essay on Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem |
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| Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Read alongside earlier works that defined the genre of the American detective novel--that is, alongside earlier works by Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, for example--Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn provides an interesting twist to the classic whodunit. The novel's protagonist Lionel Essrog--"Liable Guesscog. Final Escrow. Ironic Pissclam" (7)--has Tourette's syndrome, covering the world with an excess of language, uncovering clues through the contortions and the unraveling of his verbal tics, as opposed to traditional stealthy and erudite detective work. The winner of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Motherless Brooklyn not only takes... |
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| Essay on Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem » |
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| Essay on The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux |
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| The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The life of the American novelist Paul Theroux has been characterized by an extraordinary wanderlust. Traveling across every continent, on and off the usual tourist tracks, he has chronicled his travels in a series of remarkable books that, along with similar books by Bruce Chatwin, Jan Morris, Bill Bryson, Tony Horwitz, and Pico Iyer, have legitimized the travel narrative as a literary form. Although Theroux's novels have not occasioned the same level of critical attention as his travel books, they, too, constitute a significant, sustained contribution to contemporary American letters. A large percentage of these 18 novels are set overseas and depict the misadventures of mercenary... |
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| Essay on Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston |
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| Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Expanding ideas from a 1934 short story, "The Fire and the Cloud," to create her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston "kidnaps" Moses from Judeo-Christian scripture and "relocates" him in southern African-American folklore (Hemenway, 257-258). Initial reviews were mixed, with Louis Untermeyer referring to the novel's "unfulfilled expectation," Percy Hutchinson seeing it as "an exceptionally fine piece of work far off the beaten tracks of literature," Carl Van Vechten declaring it the best work Hurston had ever done, and Hurston herself acknowledging a "feeling of disappointment" for not achieving all she intended (Gates, 26, 27; Kaplan, 422)... |
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| Essay on Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston » |
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| Essay on Morte D'Urban by J. F. Powers |
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| Morte D'Urban by J. F. Powers Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. J. F. Powers's first novel, the National Book Award winner for 1963, Morte d'Urban, explores the same subject as most of the short stories in his two previous collections: the daily life of Roman Catholic priests in the United States. In fact, a number of the clerical characters from an early story, "Dawn" (in The Presence of Grace, 1956), reappear in the novel. But Powers's priests are a far cry from the suffering cleric of French novelist Georges Bernanos's Diary of a Country Priest; nor, for that matter, are they like the sleazy and corrupt clergymen of John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions. Neither agonizingly spiritual nor grotesquely cynical, Powers's ordinary priests are average men... |
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| Essay on Morte D'Urban by J. F. Powers » |
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| Essay on The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard |
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| The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, like much of her fiction, depicts small-town New England life through the eyes of someone stifled by its restrictions. The novel follows Cassandra Morgeson's development from childhood to womanhood in the sheltered culture of New England affluence. Cassandra is the novel's narrator and most dynamic figure: She is intense, adventurous, outspoken, and staunchly individualistic. Her sister Veronica is temperamental, sickly, and closely tied to the family home--although Veronica is also individualistic and intense, she adheres more closely than Cassandra to the domestic, passive 19th-century feminine ideal. Veronica's husband emphasizes the... |
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| Essay on Moo by Jane Smiley |
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| Moo by Jane Smiley Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Set on a mythical Midwestern land-grant university campus, Moo's focal character and image, Earl Butz, a 700-pound Landrace hog, is housed in "Old Meats," an old, practically abandoned building that somehow remains at the center of the campus just as Earl remains at the center of the novel. Part of an experiment operated under the auspices of the university, Earl Butz is allowed to eat as much as he desires to see how large he can grow unchecked. A large cast of other characters fills out many of the usual suspects to be found in a university setting, often in highly caricatured ways, including the bachelor brothers Ivar and Nils Harstead, the provost and extension dean, respectively; economics professor... |
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| Essay on Monster by Walter Dean Myers |
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| Monster by Walter Dean Myers Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The multigenre novel Monster was the first book to win the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, established in 2000. The novel also took Coretta Scott King honors (2000), was a finalist for the National Book Award (1999), and garnered numerous other honors and awards for Myers, who writes prolifically for young adults. The author was honored with the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in 1994. In Monster's opening pages, 16-year-old Steve Harmon reveals that he is being held at an adult detention facility in Manhattan, accused of acting as a lookout during a Harlem robbery that left a drugstore owner, Mr. Nesbitt, dead. In Myers's account of... |
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| Essay on Monster by Walter Dean Myers » |
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| Essay on The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey |
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| The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Witty, sardonic, and inspiring, Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang assembles a cast of the most unlikely comrades: George Washington Hayduke, the crazed, beer-guzzling Vietnam veteran; Seldom Seen Smith, the irreverent Mormon wilderness guide; wealthy, billboard-burning Doc Sarvis; and Doc Sarvis's youthful and attractive, marijuana-smoking companion, Bonnie Abbzug. The group's purpose: to impede by any means necessary the further development of the American West by greed-driven big business and shortsighted government projects. Their ultimate goal: the destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam, the symbol of all that is wrong with the ongoing devastation of the desert Southwest... |
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| Essay on Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen |
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| Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Mona in the Promised Land, the sequel to Typical American, continues to explore what it means to be American and the possibilities of the American dream. Here, Chinese-American writer Gish Jen turns her attention to Ralph and Helen Chang's two daughters, Callie and Mona, the narrator of the novel. The Changs' move to Scarshill, the immigrant's promised land, is part of the parents' process of making their daughters more Americanized, a development they encourage as long as the girls do not abandon the Chinese ways they consider important. Growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mona begins to question and rethink her parents' choices, partly as a teenager's natural desire to be... |
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| Essay on A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells |
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| A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. First published serially in Century magazine in 1882, William Dean Howells's A Modern Instance marked a significant departure from the previous work of this already established writer and editor. Howells's prior works written in the 1870s, such as Their Wedding Journey and A Chance Acquaintance, were marked by their narrow focus on one or two engaging characters. A Modern Instance, however, is the first in a series of later novels in which Howells presents a much broader array of themes and settings, and a variety of characters to depict what he had come to see as the modern condition in America at the end of the 19th century. A Modern Instance is particularly broad in scope... |
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| Essay on The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley |
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| The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Like Thomas Malory's 15th-century Morte D'Arthur, Marion Zimmer Bradley's (1930-99) The Mists of Avalon retells the British legend of the rise and fall of King Arthur, who succeeded Uther Pendragon after the defeat of Rome. Unlike Malory's narrative and earlier versions of this legend, Bradley's epic novel is written through the perspectives of the women in Arthur's life: his mother, Igraine; his aunts Viviane and Morgause; his wife, Gwenhwyfar (a spelling of Guinevere in Welsh); and his half sister Morgaine, whose voice occasionally emerges through the omniscient third-person narration with her own first-person narrative. A well-known fantasy writer, Bradley published The Mists of Avalon... |
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| Essay on The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni |
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| The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Mistress of Spices (1997) is the first novel of the poet and short-story writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who was born in Calcutta, India, in 1956, and moved to the United States in 1977 to pursue higher education. Divakaruni's experiences with women's social service organizations and as cofounder and president of Maitri, a help line for South Asian women in the San Francisco area, as well as her explicitly stated religious beliefs, have probably contributed to her depictions of Hindu mythologies and stories of spiritual healing in the novel. Divakaruni has stated in interviews that she created the novel in response to a life-threatening surgery after the birth... |
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| Essay on The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni » |
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| Essay on Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale |
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| Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Several pages into the novel Miss Lulu Bett, readers are introduced to Zona Gale's inhibited heroine: "There emerged from the fringe of things, where she perpetually hovered, Mrs. Deacon's older sister, Lulu Bett, who was 'making her home with us.' And that was precisely the case. They were not making her a home, goodness knows. Lulu was the family beast of burden" (3). This introduction says much of what we need to know about Lulu and, if one interprets the "emerged" phrase expansively, explains much of what Gale's 1920 novel is about: Lulu's emergence from a life of drudgery and dependence. While the drab community of Warbleton absorbs some of Gale's darts (the author has moved past the... |
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| Essay on Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West |
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| Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The conception for Nathanael West's second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, dates from March 1929, when West's future brother-in-law S. J. Perelman introduced him to a woman who wrote an advice column for the Brooklyn Eagle under the name "Susan Chester." She thought Perelman might use some of the actual letters she received for his broadly comic purposes, but they instead proved more useful for West's dark, tragicomic vision. West worked on the novel sporadically for the next three years while searching for a publisher for his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931). While the early work contains flashes of West's ferocious wit, his more mature second novel, painstakingly revised, would... |
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| Essay on Misery by Stephen King |
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| Misery by Stephen King Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Stephen King's Misery is perhaps best known for its film adaptation, which won an academy award for Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes and revitalized the career of James Caan as Paul Sheldon. As with so many King novels, the filmmakers decided to simplify the complex, multilevel plot structure and eliminate the extensive parallel metaphors about the writing process. They concentrated instead on the horrific elements of the work, specifically stressing the physiological torture of Paul Sheldon by his number one fan, Annie Wilkes, placing a special emphasis on the removal of his injured foot with a dull ax. Consequently, far less time is spent in the film on the psychological torture that Sheldon undergoes, an aspect... |
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| Essay on Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides |
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| Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Nine years after receiving critical accolades for his first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1994), Jeffrey Eugenides received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his second, Middlesex. It has been called an epic, a rollicking adventure, a fairy tale, a hybrid, and it has been praised for the adroit use of wit and humor that balances the darker backdrop. Because the first-person narrator is a hermaphrodite, the title resonates with multiple associations: Calliope Helen Stephinedes (known as Callie until age 14 when s/he realizes that she prefers a male identity and the name Cal) bears a chromosomal anomaly that gradually changes her during adolescence from female to middle sex to male. The title also calls... |
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| Essay on Merry Men by Carolyn Chute |
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| Merry Men by Carolyn Chute Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. This novel takes an epic look at the history of an American farming community from the 1700s to the end of the 20th century. Beginning with a vignette of the first American settlers in Maine shooting the last Indian on their land, the novel jumps to the last farmers being dispersed and destroyed as corporate culture buys out farms to make vacation homes for city dwellers. The hardships of the ancestors of contemporary Egypt, Maine, act as reminders of what forms community identity and what small acts begin its destruction. Two characters act as the voices of the community as it dies. One is Lloyd Barrington, a graves keeper and the lone college graduate in Egypt. His college education has marked him... |
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| Essay on Meridian by Alice Walker |
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| Meridian by Alice Walker Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Meridian, the title character of Alice Walker's novel, looks to politics and political life in her college years to help her find better relationships, somehow untouched by class issues. Meridian comes to college life having experienced in a short time the common conditions for a young African-American woman from a small town in the early 1960s: She lived with her parents' frustrations with bad jobs and domesticity, her own teenage pregnancy and early marriage, the resultant poverty, and her own depression. She becomes active in the civil rights movement almost accidentally, and through it she meets college-educated African Americans. Meridian is shy and sensitive; she finds the... |
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| Essay on The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers |
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| The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Member of the Wedding is Carson McCullers's fourth novel, regarded by many as her masterpiece. It was well received and widely read, and it continues to be an adaptable work, garnering popular and critical acclaim as a novel, a Broadway play, and a Hollywood film. The Member of the Wedding's resilience can be attributed to its sound conception and structure. The novel is theatrical and cinematic. It contains three parts and three main characters--Frankie Addams, Berenice Sadie Brown, and John Henry West. It has a simple setting, mostly within the kitchen of a sleepy, hot summertime southern town, and its sequence of events spans a brief period, a Friday afternoon and evening, a long... |
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| Essay on McTeague by Frank Norris |
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| McTeague by Frank Norris Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The naturalist Frank Norris's primary concern as a novelist was examining the influences of heredity and the environment on human behavior. One of his earliest and bestknown novels, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, which portrays what Norris viewed as the degenerate lifestyle of the lower class, is significantly different from the other fiction he produced, which focuses on the behavior of the more affluent. Unlike middle-class protagonists, such as Vandover in Vandover and the Brute (1914), who because of his superior breeding and heredity has the choice to act morally, Norris depicts the brutish lower-class McTeague and his miserly wife, Trina, as ignorant victims both of their defective... |
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| Essay on Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman |
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| Maus I and Maus II by Art Spiegelman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1948 to parents who survived the Holocaust, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman cofounded the comics magazine Raw, in which Maus: A Survivor's Tale, I: My Father Bleeds History was serialized before appearing as a book in 1986. Together with its sequel, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began (1991), it won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, in spite of its unorthodox comic book format, for its compelling and original depiction of Jewish life in Hitler's Europe. Crafted over a span of 13 years (1978-1991), Maus can be labeled as biography, memoir, graphic novel--it has even been shelved in the history section of stores--but it does not diminish... |
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| Essay on Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks |
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| Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Gwendolyn Brooks is best known as a poet, and Maud Martha, her only novel, is genre-bending and poetic. Drawing extensively on autobiography (Hull, 95), the text is set in Chicago's South Side, with its prominent 1950s backdrop of racism and social inequality, and follows the progress of Maud Martha Brown from age seven through dating, marriage, and childbirth. Although composed of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, Maud Martha conveys its themes in poetic ways, as Brooks affirms: "even in writing prose I find myself weighing the possibilities of every word just as I do in a poem" (Stavros, 49). Maud learns "to love moments for themselves" (78), and this is precisely what the text... |
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| Essay on Martin Eden by Jack London |
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| Martin Eden by Jack London Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Many critics have argued that Martin Eden is the most autobiographical of the 50 books Jack London produced during his short life. Condemned by both reviewers and the reading public as cynical and pessimistic at the time of its publication, Martin Eden has received more attention in recent decades. London's vivid and powerful description of the struggles that accompany the artistic process of writing fiction has inspired many and serves as a testament to London's own struggles as a writer. Like Martin Eden, London, too, wished to achieve success through writing, but also like Martin Eden, London became disillusioned with the fame that accompanied his success. Martin Eden remains today... |
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| Essay on Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser |
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| Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Long admired by critics and fellow writers for his stories of strange and obsessed craftsmen and artists, Steven Millhauser gained a wide audience in 1996 with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Martin Dressler, a less eccentric and precious work than his early fiction. The subtitle of this, his seventh book, "The Tale of an American Dreamer," suggests the two narrative streams that merge in Millhauser's magical-realist style. Written in straightforward prose with keenly observed details, the novel explores a fantastical world imagined by a true turn-of-the-century visionary. Dressler, the eponymous hero, is at once a classic American entrepreneur straight out of a novel by Theodore... |
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| Essay on The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury |
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| The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a series of stories that form an episodic novel of first contact, settlement, abandonment, and then return to the planet Mars. The red planet has been a popular subject for science fiction writers, and The Martian Chronicles uses many stock ingredients of the genre: space travel, robots, mental telepathy, the last-man and last-woman gambit, the destruction of civilization on Earth. Yet The Martian Chronicles gained a much wider audience than devotees of science fiction, making it one of the best-selling books of the 1950s. Its popularity is a tribute to the beauty of Bradbury's prose, but is also largely due to the book's consideration of... |
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| Essay on The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt |
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| The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Marrow of Tradition portrays the devastating consequences of the destruction of dialogue between blacks and whites by racial segregation. Though the novel is now viewed by many readers as Charles Chesnutt's greatest achievement, it was not as well received at the time of its publication in 1901. Chesnutt's contemporary William Dean Howells, unaccustomed to a passionate African-American perspective on racial injustice, did not appreciate the novel's "bitter" tone (Howells, 882). Howells, a previous champion of Chesnutt's writing, acknowledged even in his somewhat negative review that Chesnutt's depiction of the post-Reconstruction South was accurate and just. Nonetheless, The Marrow... |
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| Essay on Married or Single? by Catharine Maria Sedgwick |
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| Married or Single? by Catharine Maria Sedgwick Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In a letter written just after Married or Single? was published, Sedgwick described it as "a novel without any purpose or hope to slay giants, slavery, or the like, but only to supply mediocre readers with small moral hints on various subjects that come up in daily life" (Dewey, 369). Her conventionally modest disclaimer underestimates her final novel's scope as well as its achievement. Sedgwick's Married or Single? can be read as a compendium of the genres that were popularized by 19th-century American women writers, including the seduction novel, the conversion narrative, the novel of education, and social reform fiction. The novel was both criticized and praised by... |
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| Essay on The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne |
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| The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's romance, is a combination of melodrama, travel essay, critical meditation on art and artists, and essay on comparative religion--all of which are highly inflected with moral and spiritual allegory. The plot has many elements typical of melodrama: a persecuted female innocent, her enigmatic victimizer, her would-be savior, secret crimes placed within the context of metaphysical guilt, the overwrought expression of pent-up emotions, and preoccupation with fatality. The major action is set in 19th-century Rome. Hawthorne's Rome is a moral sermon on "the pretence of Holiness and the reality of Nastiness" (326). Persistent references to the sedimentation of death... |
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| Essay on Mao II by Don DeLillo |
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| Mao II by Don DeLillo Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Mao II, Don DeLillo's 10th novel, won the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1992 as the best work of fiction by an American author. Mao II is a postmodern novel focusing on the individual psyche among the crowd or society, and the roles of individuals (especially authors and terrorists) in today's superficially modern culture. DeLillo often focuses on the artificiality or superficiality of late 20th-century life, and how this artificiality leads to alienation and seclusion. The protagonist of this work, Bill Gray, is a Pynchon-esque novelist/recluse who comes out of hiding to save a poet taken hostage by terrorists in Beirut, Lebanon. DeLillo romanticizes the role of novelists as intellectual terrorists whose territory... |
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| Essay on The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren |
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| The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Man with the Golden Arm won the first National Book Award in 1950. It was Nelson Algren's fourth book, third novel, and first commercial success. In 1955, it was made into a film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Frank Sinatra (who scooped up the role while Marlon Brando held out for a finished script) as Frankie Machine opposite Kim Novak. Algren was initially hired to write the screenplay, but, as he summed up his Hollywood stint in a later interview, "I went out there for a thousand a week, and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday" (Anderson and Southern, 58). The novel follows Frankie "Machine" Majcinek... |
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| Essay on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by Dorothy Johnson |
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| The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by Dorothy Johnson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, first published in Cosmopolitan in 1949, is the story of Ransome Foster, a young eastern "tenderfoot, with his own reasons for being there and no aim in life at all" (Johnson, 90). The story begins with an older Foster, now a senator, returning to the town of Twotrees for the funeral of an old friend, Bert Barricune. The plot shifts its focus when the senator is asked by a reporter why he is attending the funeral instead of working in Washington. Readers are then told the story of how Foster showed up in Twotrees after being beaten by a villain named Liberty Valance, how he won the hand of a young woman (Bert Barricune's sweetheart)... |
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| Essay on The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon |
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| The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Richard Condon's novel about a Congressional Medal of Honor winner programmed by Chinese brainwashers, during his internment as a prisoner of war in Korea, to assassinate an American politician was the basis of the 1962 film of the same name directed by John Frankenheimer, which was yanked from distribution following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A best-seller on first publication, it has enjoyed a reputation and readership that has grown with every reissue or remake of that film, while both book and film continue to grip the popular imagination due to increasing contemporary anxieties about the possibilities of mind control. Like all conspiracy narratives... |
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| Essay on A Man Called Horse by Dorothy Johnson |
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| A Man Called Horse by Dorothy Johnson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Born in Iowa and raised in Whitefish, Montana, Dorothy M. Johnson wrote fiction reflecting the Old West values that she learned as a child. Her work, however, has failed to receive the critical success it deserves, perhaps because the film adaptations of these works have become so famous. John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which starred John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, has become a classic, and both Hanging Tree (starring Gary Cooper) and A Man Called Horse (starring Richard Harris) were successful films in their own right. All three have become standard titles in the western film genre and have worked their way into the American consciousness. But another reason... |
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| Essay on The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos |
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| The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990, Oscar Hijuelos's tale of music, passion, and self-destruction, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, was also nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle and the National Book Award. Translated into more than 20 languages, the novel was adapted in 1992 for a Warner Brothers film of the same name, starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas as the Castillo brothers, Cesar and Nestor. As the first Latino writer to receive the Pulitzer, Hijuelos has been critically acknowledged alongside such Latin American authors as Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Hijuelos, however, points out stylistic... |
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| Essay on Mama Day by Gloria Naylor |
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| Mama Day by Gloria Naylor Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Set on the fictional Willow Springs, an island located on the eastern coast of the United States exactly between South Carolina and Georgia, Gloria Naylor's third novel tells the story of an African-American community that triumphed over slavery and continues to thrive as the new millennium approaches. The novel's main characters are Miranda, or Mama Day, the community's midwife and healer, and her grandniece, Ophelia Day, nicknamed Cocoa, who falls in love in New York and eventually brings her city-bred husband to her remote island home. Minor characters include Dr. Buzzard, a community bootlegger and would-be witch doctor, and Bernice Duvall, a young woman whom Miranda helps to conceive a... |
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| Essay on The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett |
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| The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. There is general agreement that Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is one of the most influential of all detective stories, rivaled, perhaps, only by Poe's "Murder in the Rue Morgue," which established the conventions of the genre, and by Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, which presented the archetypal detective, Sherlock Holmes, in his greatest full-length adventure. Sam Spade was not the first of the hard-boiled detectives; he was not even Hammett's first hard-boiled detective. He was, however, almost immediately recognized as the paragon of the new tough type of detective: a cynical, wisecracking (e.g., Joel Cairo: "you have always, I must say, a smooth explanation ready." Sam Spade... |
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| Essay on The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein |
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| The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. First published in 1925, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans holds a central place among both American and international modernist writing. Given its massive size (925 pages) and difficult prose style, the novel challenges a comfortable and unengaged reading experience; yet, for Stein, that is just the point. The word "progress" in the novel's subtitle functions in contradictory, though not irresolvable, ways. From Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" to discourses lauding developments in economy, industry, and transportation, the American identity has always keyed in to the notion of progress, of continual improvement and advancement; likewise, the reader typically... |
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| Essay on Main Street by Sinclair Lewis |
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| Main Street by Sinclair Lewis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. One of the best known of Sinclair Lewis's novels, Main Street is important as a work of social satire and as an expose that revealed the stifling limitations of small-town life in America. The novel's heroine, Carol Kennicott, observes that popular literature traditionally depicted the small town in one of two ways: one insisting on its virtue--that "the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls"--and the other celebrating its rustic humor (264). To these Lewis added a third: the small town as "dullness made God" (165). Although works such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) had already begun to express similar murmurings of... |
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| Essay on Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane |
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| Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. As a writer of naturalism, Stephen Crane seeks to describe human beings and their interactions with the surrounding environment objectively and accurately. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Crane explores how human beings are significantly influenced by their surroundings. Crane's dark description of life in 19th-century American urban tenement housing depicts the negative effects that living in a slum has on both a person's psyche and physical well-being. The book was far too shocking and brutal in its depiction of slum life for his reading public's genteel tastes, so Crane was forced to published Maggie himself under a pseudonym. Crane opens his novel with a description of young... |
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| Essay on Madame Delphine by George Washington Cable |
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| Madame Delphine by George Washington Cable Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. George Washington Cable's Madame Delphine is part of a Creole trilogy that describes the people, the streets, and the atmosphere of New Orleans. Creoles are defined as people of French ancestry born in Louisiana. The trilogy includes the short story collection Old Creole Days (1879) and the novel The Grandissimes (1880), a vivid depiction of the intrusion of American outsiders of various hues and backgrounds into the French-based, European-focused, white society of old New Orleans. Madame Delphine, a novella derived from an earlier story entitled "Tite Poulette," appeared in Scribner's Monthly from May to July 1881, and that same year Scribner's published the novella... |
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| Essay on Lovingkindness by Anne Roiphe |
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| Lovingkindness by Anne Roiphe Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Dubbed a "feminist mother's nightmare" (34) by a Ms. magazine reviewer, Anne Roiphe's Lovingkindness focuses on Annie Johnson, a nominally Jewish professor and scholar of women's studies in New York City. After five months of silence, her troubled 22-year-old daughter-- who once wrote "God Sucks" on the bathroom mirror--phones her mother to tell her she is living as a dedicated follower of an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem. The story of how Annie struggles to bring her daughter back to the contemporary world and the resolution of that conflict creates an emotionally powerful narrative and a luminous parable of the mother-daughter theme within the contexts of modern feminism and... |
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| Essay on Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich |
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| Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, published in 1984 with 14 chapters, was named best work of fiction by the National Book Critics Circle; the novel was republished in 1993 with 18 chapters. This first novel of a series of four multigenerational novels focuses mostly on the Native American families of the Kashpaws, Lamartines, Lazarres, and Morrisseys living out the joys and hardships of contemporary reservation life, including "alcoholism, suicide, abandoned children, disrupted relationships, yet continuity in extended families, new life, escapes and humor" (Hafen, 16). Love Medicine's multiple narrators explore stories of parents and children, siblings, husbands and wives... |
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| Essay on The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold |
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| The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Before publication, Alice Sebold's first novel was in its sixth printing due to advance publicity and interest. The novel remained at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for several months. In the United Kingdom, it received the Richard and Judy television show's first Best Read Award, in addition to its many American prizes. A film of the novel is scheduled for release in 2007. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who won Oscars for their Lord of the Rings trilogy, will be directing the film. In a modern reconfiguring of the omniscient narrator, the voice of dead 14-year-old Suzie Salmon narrates the novel. From a quasi-Christian, high school-like "heaven," Suzie begins with a brutally... |
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| Essay on The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold » |
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| Essay on Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy |
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| Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Like Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy was a Roman Catholic Southerner who attempted to address metaphysical questions in an age that seemed to have lost faith in the efficacy of metaphysical discussions. But whereas O'Connor typically explored the grotesque possibilities in unfortunate or damaged characters awkwardly confronting troubling dilemmas, Percy focused on the malaise that passes for contentment in the midst of affluence. In the details of everyday life, Percy saw the evidence of a gnawing spiritual emptiness underlying the pursuit and even the acquisition of material comfort. Percy was 45 years old when he won a National Book Award for his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961)... |
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| Essay on A Lost Lady by Willa Cather |
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| A Lost Lady by Willa Cather Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Willa Cather's A Lost Lady examines changing gender roles and traditions in a modern world that is no longer an "age of innocence," as Edith Wharton would describe it. According to Cather, "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," the year that would see numerous influential works published, such as James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, works that would redefine literature within the post-World War I era. Cather opens the novel with a retrospective look at life in the West, amid the meadows and pristine lands, with a nostalgia that appreciates many traditions of a late Victorian time. Set in Sweet Water, in the western plains, where Captain Forrester could... |
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| Essay on Losing Battles by Eudora Welty |
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| Losing Battles by Eudora Welty Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In Eudora Welty's novel Losing Battles, the Beechams and Renfros hold a daylong family reunion and attend a funeral in the 1930s southern town of Banner, Mississippi. At more than 400 pages, this comic novel is Welty's longest, consisting mainly of the authentic southern dialogue for which the author is famous. With the exception of a few major characters, the members of this large family are hard to distinguish, and they, like the characters in Welty's early novel Delta Wedding (1949), function more as a family unit than as individuals. Also like Delta Wedding, this novel reflects Welty's trademark fascination with family, place, and the conflict between the individual and the community... |
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| Essay on Looking For Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner |
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| Looking For Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Freedom of Information Act, The Godfather, Part II won six Oscars, Rolling Stone reported on the burgeoning disco craze, the Vietnam War ended, and the author Judith Rossner published Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a book that would go on to revolutionize nonfiction (along with its predecessors The Collector and In Cold Blood) and its role in covering real events. This one is about Theresa (Terry) Dunn, a young school teacher who, to keep loneliness at bay, goes to bars to meet and pick up men. This psychosexual saga leads to her brutal murder on New Year's Eve. Theresa's family would, by today's standards, be kindly classified as dysfunctional... |
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| Essay on Looking For Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner » |
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| Essay on Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy |
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| Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. This utopian novel launched a political mass movement and provided a program for the Populist Party. Though neglected by scholars now, Bellamy's novel was an instant best-seller at the time of its first publication. It sold millions, and across the United States readers established 165 "Bellamy Clubs" for the discussion and implementation of the novel's ideas. Looking Backward influenced so many politicians, philosophers, and economists, including Thorstein Veblen, that some put it second only to Karl Marx's Capital in terms of its impact on the political thought of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The success of the work was in part due to the public appetite for utopian... |
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| Essay on Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe |
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| Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Critics typically describe Thomas Wolfe's first and most famous novel as a bildungsroman, and this autobiographical narrative definitely abides by the strictures of that term: "a novel of education from youth to experience" (Frye 74). In the most basic sense, Look Homeward, Angel chronicles the infancy, boyhood, and young adulthood of its central character, Eugene Gant. Eugene is the youngest of nine children (of whom only six actually survive) born to W. O. Gant and his wife, Eliza. Gant, Eugene's father, spends his life working as a stonecutter and tombstone merchant, and the book's initial pages involve Gant's own youthful travels from Baltimore to the southern mountain town of Altamont... |
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| Essay on Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov |
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| Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Vladimir Nabokov called Lolita, his third novel composed in English, a record of his "love affair" with the "English language" (Nabokov, Lolita, 316). It is generally regarded, along with Pale Fire, as his masterpiece and as one of the major novels of the 20th century. At once a penetrating study of the psychology of sexual obsession, a poignant if bizarre love story, and a trenchant social satire, Lolita is stylistically complex and richly intertextual, drawing upon the conventions of "the confessional mode, the literary diary, the Romantic novel that chronicles the effects of a debilitating love, the Doppelganger tale," and the detective story (Appel, l). The novel takes the form of the... |
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| Essay on Little Women by Louisa May Alcott |
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| Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Academic literacy is significantly influenced by remembered and cherished texts brought to the classroom. Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a fictionalized autobiography and classic children's text about four girls growing up during the Civil War, is one of those texts. A vivid view of life in 19th-century New England, Little Women was written primarily as a source of income for its author but immediately drew significant response and remains a popular text for reading lists. In the early 1900s the text became the subject of two silent movies and was later adapted to include dialogue. In contrast to those of other children's books of the period, Alcott's protagonists are not unblemished... |
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| Essay on Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor |
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| Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Gloria Naylor explored women's communities in a rundown urban neighborhood in her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Her second, Linden Hills (1985), focuses on class considerations in an upscale neighborhood. In fact, as critic Robert Jones notes, for the women who reside in Brewster Place, "Linden Hills rises above their dead-end street as a dream to be achieved" (Jones, 283). Linden Hills represents the realization of the dream of Luther Needed and his descendents. Together, they create a place for African Americans and defy the white racists who surround them. Unlike the piece of heaven the Needed men envision, however, the dream is doomed: Linden Hills materializes... |
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| Essay on The Light in the Piazza by Elizabeth Spencer |
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| The Light in the Piazza by Elizabeth Spencer Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Light in the Piazza is one of Elizabeth Spencer's several works set in Italy, where she lived for a few years after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship. The novella, which was first published in the New Yorker and later made into a film and musical, begins as Margaret Johnson and her daughter Clara visit Florence on a European tour. As Mrs. Johnson falls in love with the beautiful Florentine setting, a young, wealthy Italian, Fabrizio Naccarelli, falls in love with her beautiful daughter. Clara is a 26-year-old woman who, because of a childhood accident, has the mind of a 10-year-old. To Mrs. Johnson's surprise, however, after several conversations neither Fabrizio... |
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| Essay on Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis |
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| Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Originally published in the April 1861 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills had been virtually forgotten for over a century before the Feminist Press brought the story to the attention of a new generation of readers and students. The novella--one of the first portrayals of 19th-century factory life--has become canonical, included in women's literature courses as an early feminist work and in American literature courses as an example of the transition between the sentimental novel and realism. Indeed, much criticism on the work stems from its puzzling ambiguities, especially regarding the exact nature of its sympathies and... |
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| Essay on Libra by Don DeLillo |
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| Libra by Don DeLillo Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Libra, Don DeLillo's ninth novel, is about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but, as the critic Frank Lentricchia asserts, "DeLillo's American tragedy is much more Oswald's than it is Kennedy's; much more America's than it is the tragedy of an isolated psychopath" (Lentricchia, 198). That the story is about Oswald, and even more significantly about America, is evident in the double narrative structure of the novel. The first narrative is a fictional account of Oswald's life. The second, appearing in every other chapter, begins with the character Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA agent, sitting in a small room where he tirelessly reviews 25 years of data and evidence regarding the Kennedy... |
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| Essay on A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines |
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| A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Ernest Gaines's novel A Lesson Before Dying was published in 1993 but gained bestseller status when Oprah Winfrey named it as her Book Club selection in September 1997. Set in the 1940s in the small Southern town of Bayonne, Louisiana, the novel tells the story of a beleaguered school teacher, Grant Wiggins, who has returned from college to serve a "plantation" school in his home town. His goal as an educator is to motivate his African-American charges to become both literate and self-confident members of their community. As the novel begins, however, Wiggins is clearly despondent about his potential to attain this goal, especially given the prejudice of the local school... |
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| Essay on The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin |
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| The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, the author Ursula K. Le Guin argues that science fiction does not foretell what will become of humanity, but rather takes advantage of modern metaphors to portray our actual character and behavior: "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive" (Introduction). Therefore, she argues, even the use of a future era becomes a metaphor. Le Guin's account of envoy Genly Ai's mission to Gethen/Winter to draw the reclusive planet into joining a larger federation--the aptly named Ekumen--draws upon and comments on the modern world's attempt at both uniting nations into peaceful alliances while retaining each people's individual... |
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| Essay on Le Divorce by Diane Johnson |
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| Le Divorce by Diane Johnson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. National Book Award finalist Diane Johnson's eighth novel, Le Divorce, belongs to the genre of the international or transatlantic novel refined by Henry James and Edith Wharton at the turn of the 20th century and proves that the theme of the American expatriate in Paris is still intriguing. The action of the novel covers a period of six months during its first-person narrator Isabel Walker's stay in Paris, where she goes from Santa Barbara to baby-sit for her pregnant stepsister, Roxanne de Persand, and to take off some of her "rough California edges" (5). Isabel arrives in Paris on the day after her sister was abandoned by her French husband, Charles-Henri de Persand, for a Czechoslovak... |
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| Essay on The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper |
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| The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Hawkeye, the Leatherstocking, the Pathfinder, the Deerslayer, the Long Rifle, the frontier scout, and the trapper--by any of these names we may know about Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo, one of early American literature's most enduring characters, created by James Fenimore Cooper in 1823. A memorable hero in U.S. culture, Natty Bumppo is an Englishman raised by missionaries among Indians whose proprietorship of the wilderness is evidenced by his familiarity with hidden places and pathways, his feelings for his environment, and his skill as a guide. Although Natty is "a man without a cross" who has no Indian blood, he understands Indian ways as much as any white man... |
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| Essay on The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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| The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Readers coming to F. Scott Fitzgerald s Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon, from The Great Gatsby or Tender Is the Night may be disappointed, due to its incompleteness at the time of the author's premature death. It stands much like the scaffolding of the roofless, yet already partly furnished, house that is one of its major symbols. Not surprisingly, the qualities of its parts exceed that of its sketchy whole. It provides enough social and psychological insight, memorable descriptions, and quotable lines to encourage the reader to wonder how it might have been revised and expanded. The novel's focus is Monroe Stahr, a Jewish man in his mid-thirties who rose from the ghetto of an East Coast... |
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| Essay on The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve |
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| The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Anita Shreve has worked as both a novelist and a journalist in her professional life. Her talent as a journalist shows in her literature most specifically in her attention to detail and her ability to captivate a reader in the first few paragraphs of her novels. The Last Time They Met, her eighth novel, combines journalistic details with a creative plot to place the reader "in the middle of the action." Original structure and poetic imagery make The Last Time They Met an unforgettable read. Thomas Janes and Linda Fallon, the novel's central characters, meet and fall in love when they are 17. Linda is sent away after they are involved in a car accident, and they lose touch. They meet... |
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| Essay on The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper |
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| The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Last of the Mohicans is the second of the five books making up Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, and its action is second in terms of the adventures of Cooper's hero Natty Bumppo and his Indian friend Chingachgook. The first novel of the series, The Pioneers (1823), portrays Natty, bitter and at the end of his life, leading a group of pioneers westward, and fighting to protect the wilderness against the ever encroaching civilization. The Last of the Mohicans takes the reader back to Natty's youth, when he, Chingachgook, and Chingachgook's son Uncas are given the task, during the French and Indian War, of escorting Alice and Cora Munro from Fort Edward through the... |
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| Essay on The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy |
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| The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Last Gentleman is Walker Percy's second novel, preceded by The Moviegoer, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1962. A southerner and Roman Catholic, Percy has confirmed the influence of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, but his writing is unquestionably unique, particularly in his ability to infuse philosophical musings with wry wit. The Last Gentleman is a philosophical novel written in a comic picaresque mode. It begins with the quest of 25-year-old Will Barret for his romantic love, Kitty. But the adventures of this southern gentleman quickly become less a quest for Kitty than an urgent chase to find her brother, Jamie, before he dies of leukemia. That, in turn, changes... |
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| Essay on Lanny Budd Series by Upton Sinclair |
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| Lanny Budd Series by Upton Sinclair Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Lanny Budd series, also known as the World's End series after the first novel in the series, by Upton Sinclair, focuses on a young American abroad in the tumultuous years between the beginning of World War I and the beginning of the cold war. Lanny functions both as an everyman, caught in the rising tide of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and as a spokesperson for the ideas of the political theorist Upton Sinclair, who felt that fiction ought to help educate readers about economic and social injustice. Many of the novels in the series were immensely popular, and one, Dragon's Teeth, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. Lanny ages as the century does, starting... |
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| Essay on The Landlord at Lion's Head by William Dean Howells |
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| The Landlord at Lion's Head by William Dean Howells Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. "Overlooked" and "underappreciated" are two adjectives commonly used by critics to describe The Landlord at Lion's Head. It is something of a mystery why this unusual and compelling work by Howells remains relatively unknown. Robert Mielke notes that it is one of "only a handful of Howells' works that read like modern writing," meaning that Landlord contains more action and description and less extended discussion than many of the author's other novels (Mielke, 96). The novel's more "modern" style, however, in no way affects the characteristic depth and precision with which Howells constructs the story of a New England rustic who attempts to make his fortune in the elite... |
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| Essay on Lancelot by Walker Percy |
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| Lancelot by Walker Percy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. "Come into my cell. Make yourself at home" (Lancelot, 1). Walker Percy directs these opening lines of monologue toward readers as much as Lancelot extends them toward Father John. With this polite invitation into the mind of a sane, clear-thinking madman, the reader begins a journey on a quest to discern illusion from reality, with the only guide being the madman himself. Percy fuses vivid description and multiple historical and literary references to an exaggerated mix of sanity and madness, allowing readers to journey with Lance in his quest for a New World. Lancelot can be read and interpreted successfully in several different ways: as an apocalyptical tale or as a fictional work of one... |
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| Essay on Klail City by Rolando Hinojosa-Smith |
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| Klail City by Rolando Hinojosa-Smith Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The second novel of the Klail City Death Trip Series, this novel, for which Hinojosa was awarded the Casa de las Americas prize in Cuba in 1976, shows a clear similarity to Tomas Rivera's style, particularly his penchant for the sketch form. The characters in Klail City, however, hope for a more optimistic future than the ones in Y no se lo Trago la tierra. The series opened with Estampas del Valle y otras obras (Sketches of the Valley and Other Works), which was awarded the Quinto Sol prize in 1973. First published in Spanish as Klail City y sus alrededores in 1976 and divided in two parts--"Generaciones y Semblanzas" (Generations and semblances) and "Notas de Klail City y sus alrededores"... |
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| Essay on The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan |
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| The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Amy Tan ranks as a major Chinese-American author on the strength of The Joy Luck Club, a novel portraying the complex mother-daughter relationship as well as Asian-American women's voices and identities. In her second best-seller, The Kitchen God's Wife, which continues to explore the mother's life stories, Tan constructs a daughter narrative to recapitulate her mother's story in China, thereby delving into a broader China narrative. The trope of journey, the return to the mother(land) as discovery and reconciliation, plays a central role in Tan's stories. As the Asian-American critic Sau-ling Cynthia Wong observes, the major reason for the sensational success of The Joy Luck Club... |
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| Essay on Kindred by Octavia Butler |
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| Kindred by Octavia Butler Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Octavia Butler is one of a handful of African-American science fiction writers; there were even fewer in 1979, when Kindred was published. In February 2004, the 25th-anniversary edition of the text was released in the United Kingdom and the United States. Butler's fourth novel, Kindred is generally shelved in the science fiction section, although Butler argues against such definition because the text, which utilizes the trope of time travel in order to place its heroine in antebellum Maryland, does not describe the science of this trope. Her readers would likely argue against such external limitations on the scope of Butler's text as well, because she appeals to those in ethnic and women's... |
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| Essay on Killing Mister Watson by Peter Matthiessen |
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| Killing Mister Watson by Peter Matthiessen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Killing Mister Watson, the first installment of Peter Matthiessen's Watson trilogy, tells an emblematic frontier story set in the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands region of southwest Florida. One of the best-written novels in the tradition of multiple first-person narratives since William Faulkner, Killing Mister Watson revolves around the enigmatic story of the life and death of E. J. Watson, who was shot down by fishermen and farmers of his neighborhood on a remote island of the Everglades frontier on October 24, 1910. The novel reads almost like a classic Western tale as neighbors remember Watson as the cold-blooded killer of the outlaw queen Belle Starr, who... |
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| Essay on The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau |
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| The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Shirley Ann Grau's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Keepers of the House, offers its readers a glimpse into the history of the Howland family--pillars of their rural Southern community--from the early 1800s through the middle of the 20th century. Telling her story in the form of a flashback, Grau opens her narrative with Abigail Howland Mason Tolliver, the protagonist's granddaughter, who informs the reader of the racial strife of the fictional town, Madison City, in which the Howlands have prospered for over a century. Having lost his first wife years earlier, William Howland secretly marries his African-American housekeeper, Margaret Carmichael, and has three children with... |
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| Essay on Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price |
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| Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Begun in 1984, Kate Vaiden was about one-third completed when a tumor was discovered braided in the core of Reynolds Price's spinal cord (Schiff, 8). Surgery, radiation treatment, and paraplegia followed. Two years later, in 1986, the novel was published and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This was in the dead center of a period (1984-88) that Price refers to in his 1994 memoir A Whole New Life and elsewhere as "the eye of the storm." Kate Vaiden is in all ways a watershed text. In a review of Kate Vaiden for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called the novel "tender and frightening, lyrical and dramatic" and observed that it was "the product of a storyteller working at the... |
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| Essay on Junky by William S. Burroughs |
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| Junky by William S. Burroughs Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. William S. Burroughs authored his first novel, Junkie: The Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, under the pseudonym William Lee. Published by Ace Books in 1953, the novel reappeared in 1977, published by Penguin Books, under the author's given name and with the title Junky. The novel chronicles Lee's career as a heroin addict who attempts to prolong and defeat his addiction. Lee's simultaneously destructive and preservative habits are among the novel's contradictory thematic and structural features. Junky consists of vignettes that gel into a coherent narrative. The reader should note, though, the unclear sense of time, which approximates a drug addict's altered... |
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| Essay on The Jungle by Upton Sinclair |
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| The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. If all attempts at self-publishing were as successful as Upton Sinclair's with The Jungle, that industry would be on fire. The novel was originally commissioned by Fred Warren, the editor of an American socialist journal, Appeal to Reason, who funded Sinclair's research in Chicago's meatpacking industry. When completed, it was not appealing to publishers of the day because of its gloom and radical content, so Sinclair advertised in Appeal to Reason and received nearly 1,000 orders. Telling Doubleday of the demand, the publisher decided that it did not want to miss the opportunity and published The Jungle in 1906. It became a bestseller internationally, and although Sinclair wrote 92 books... |
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| Essay on Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison |
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| Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. This controversial unfinished second novel was assembled by the scholar John F. Callahan from fragments written over 50 years and published posthumously. The novel consists of a dialogue between Adam Sunraider and Reverend Hickman, interwoven with their memories and dreams. Sunraider, otherwise known as Bliss, is a racist senator raised as a light-skinned African-American foundling by a black church community and his adopted father, the Reverend Hickman. Bliss chooses to pass as white, reject Hickman and the others, and build a political career on race-baiting. Fatally wounded by an assassin's gun on the Senate floor at the novel's opening, Adam Sunraider lies dying in a hospital and calls... |
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| Essay on Jubilee by Margaret Walker |
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| Jubilee by Margaret Walker Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Jubilee, a slave narrative, centers on the character Elvira Dutton Ware Brown--"Vyry," Walker's great-grandmother. Vyry differs from other characters in the book because she actually lived; she is not a character that Walker invented. Walker's grandmother told her the story of Vyry when Walker was a child, and from that moment Walker knew that it was a story that needed to be spread widely. She began researching the era in which her great-grandmother had lived and discovered that many of the texts from the era were inconsistent. Of course, texts from the perspectives of the white Southerners and the slaves differed in opinion, but the slave versions also differed with those expressing Northern... |
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| Essay on JR by William Gaddis |
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| JR by William Gaddis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. William Gaddis 's satire on capitalist expansiveness and unabated appetite gets its name from the central character, an 11-year-old boy who, in his nihilistic single-minded wheeling and dealing, personifies the immature amorality of the economic drive, but who, in his irrepressible obliviousness, bodies forth the uncontainable anarchic energies of the cosmos itself. Sweater bursting at the elbow, shoelaces always untied, JR has a whirlwind presence that generates countless collisions, spills, and misunderstandings. He is a prodigy of nature whose identifying expletive "holy shit" encapsulates the comic mode's ambiguous beatification of waste and prodigality. Fittingly, the book's voluminous pages... |
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| Essay on The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan |
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| The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Amy Tan follows in the tradition of Asian-American literature that began with the Eaton sisters, who published under the pseudonyms Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, and more contemporary writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston. Tan's success, however, which was established with the publication of The Joy Luck Club, exceeds that of her Asian-American predecessors. Tan, a second-generation Chinese American and freelance business writer, published The Joy Luck Club in 1989, and the novel became a best seller on both hardcover and paperback lists. It also became a great success among critics and literature teachers, as evidenced by a 2002 edition in the Modern Critical Interpretations... |
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| Essay on Jonah's Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston |
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| Jonah's Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Written in only a few months, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Zora Neale Hurston's first novel, combines autobiographical elements, Hurston's extensive field research on African-American folk culture, and her own storytelling skill. Sharon L. Jones describes it as a celebration of African-American culture at all socioeconomic levels (Jones, 67), but the novel is usually dealt with as "the fictionalization of her parents' marriage" (Wall, 189). Originally titled Big Nigger, her family's nickname for her father, the novel features main characters John and Lucy Pearson, clearly drawn on Hurston's parents. It is set initially in Alabama, where Hurston was born, and then in Eatonville... |
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| Essay on Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee |
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| Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine brought widespread popular and scholarly attention to south Asian literature written in the United States, and placed South Asian American experiences on the map of American literature. Since its publication in 1989, the novel has been popular among female readers interested in ethnicity and immigration; it was highly acclaimed as a new minority voice by mainstream reviewers, scholars, and critics; and it is taught in Asian-American studies courses. Jasmine is a first-person narrative about a young Punjabi peasant woman, Jyoti Vijh, who moves from Hasnapur village in Punjab to the United States as an illegal immigrant, to fulfill the dream of her husband... |
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| Essay on Jane Field by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
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| Jane Field by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was already a respected short story writer when her first novel, Jane Field, was published, first as a serial in Harper's Magazine (Hutton, 28) and then in book form. A reviewer for The Nation noted at the time that the novel is "strange to say, of the same quality" as her short stories (Marchalonis, 29). The reviewer is not referring to the relative success of the novel compared to that of the short stories but rather is pointing out that Jane Field is similar in tone and subject matter to Freeman's well-known shorter works. The title character is an older woman in a difficult situation, a staple of Freeman's stories. Shirley Marchalonis notes that the novel... |
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| Essay on It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis |
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| It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Sinclair Lewis wrote this 458-page novel in only four months (June-September 1935). He was immersed enough in his sources that he had no need to conduct his usual extensive preliminary research. Moreover, he wanted to seize the opportunity to give a fictional warning against the threat of fascism in America, which appeared to be increasingly possible by spring 1935. This threat was in response to the Great Depression (since 1929) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal (since 1933) and came from various American fascist leaders and their organizations, influenced by Italian Fascism and German Nazism. The greatest threat to FDR, however, came from American demagogues, whose... |
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| Essay on Ironweed by William Kennedy |
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| Ironweed by William Kennedy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. William Kennedy's novel Ironweed was published in 1983 to immediate success and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. Its popularity brought renewed attention to the first novels--Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game--of Kennedy's growing Albany cycle of novels. Ironweed's status was ensured when in 1986 it was made into a feature-length film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, directed by Hector Babenco, with a screenplay by Kennedy himself. Ironweed opens in 1938 to introduce us to roustabout Francis Phelan, an Irish-American ex-baseball player who for 20 years has been living a hardscrabble drinking life on the road with his companion Helen... |
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| Essay on Iola Leroy, Or Shadows Uplifted by Frances Harper |
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| Iola Leroy, Or Shadows Uplifted by Frances Harper Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Critics of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's final novel, Iola Leroy, Or Shadows Uplifted, have condemned its idealism, sentimentality, use of stock characters, and imitation of William Wells Brown's Clotel. Yet Vashti Lewis has noted that Harper broke "new ground in the development of the tragic mulatto character" (Foster, "Introduction" to Iola LeRoy, Or Shadows Uplifted, xxxvii). Contemporary critics have also emphasized that Harper quite consciously experimented with literary genre, technique, and theme. The main character, Iola, enters the novel as a tragic mulatta who thinks herself a white woman until, upon her father's death, she learns of her mother's... |
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| Essay on Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison |
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| Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Now considered a classic of the American canon, Invisible Man (1952) was the only novel Ralph Ellison published during his lifetime. It received the National Book Award for fiction in 1953. Critics have discerned in this novel the influence of the writers Herman Melville, Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, and the influence of the jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong. Autobiographical elements also appear in the work. From 1933 to 1936, Ellison studied music at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a school similar to the college that the narrator attends in the early chapters of Invisible Man. Like the narrator... |
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| Essay on The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster |
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| The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In his novelistic memoir, The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster writes that a story's function is "to make a man see the thing before his eyes by holding up another thing to view and in so doing delight him away from the fact" (151). In The Invention of Solitude, Auster invents his own mythology. His work contains aspects of his own life, acknowledgments to other literature, and detailed descriptions of actual historic figures and events. Therefore, autobiographical details from Auster's own life can, in some novels, become a detail in a character's life: a self that can radiate toward infinite possible relations. While Auster's work examines subjectivity and representation... |
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| Essay on In The Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez |
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| In The Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In keeping with the reference to butterflies in its title, Julia Alvarez's novel is about transformation--in particular, the transformation of women from domestic, law-abiding wives and mothers into courageous, rebellious martyrs. Loosely based on the 1960 murder of three young Dominican women known as "Las Mariposas" (the butterflies), this book recounts their call to action and growing involvement with a revolutionary group fighting against the despotic Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Over the course of the novel, we see the young Mirabal sisters grow in courage and strength as they defy traditional feminine conventions and aid revolutionaries in a plot to... |
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| Essay on Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice |
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| Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Anne Rice began her popular series of vampire novels with a bildungsroman that follows the physical, moral, and psychological development of its main character, Louis. Unlike his literary predecessors Dracula and Carmilla, the vampire Louis controls the narrative by telling his own story. Anne Rice's use of first-person narrative, American settings, and nonsolitary vampires established a new standard for vampire characters in the horror genre. Louis and his progenitor Lestat resemble traditional literary vampires in that they are "citizens of the world" (Gelder, 111). The setting shifts from a contemporary room overlooking Divisadero Street in San Francisco, to old New Orleans... |
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| Essay on In Memoriam to Identity by Kathy Acker |
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| In Memoriam to Identity by Kathy Acker Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The novel In Memoriam to Identity (1990) is essentially a series of largely disconnected epitaphs to a discarded concept of identity--that is, to "identity" conceived as transcendental and subjective that would endure unchanged through time and exist independently of all relations to the other. What Acker's book suggests, in a manner that seems disjointed and even at times haphazard, is that personal identity is based on the exposure to the other person that is revealed by sexuality (the final and perhaps most significant word of the book). The three cycles of narrative in the novel intersect with one another. The first narrative strand is a willfully anachronistic and reconstructive... |
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| Essay on In Cold Blood by Truman Capote |
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| In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The first "nonfiction novel" to gain critical acclaim and widespread popularity, In Cold Blood intrigues readers for a number of reasons: It evokes such earlier works as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, also based on an actual crime; it uses actual events and transforms a sensational crime into art; and it serves as an influence on later examples of the "new journalism," like those novels of Norman Mailer or Joseph Wambaugh that are its heirs. Perhaps more fascinating is the phenomenon noticed by readers of that time as well as those of today--the way the novel purposefully elucidates the collision between two segments of American society: the God-fearing, law abiding farmer and... |
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| Essay on Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs |
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| Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Harriet Jacobs wrote this autobiographical book under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Though often classified as nonfiction, the various novelistic structures and modes of expression in the book make it rise above any single generic category. Written before the Civil War, it can be read today as a suspenseful episodic adventure novel complete with an innocent prey and her evil pursuer, disguises, counterfeits, escapes by sea, and dark hideaways with names like "Snaky Swamp." The hounded victim, however, is a mulatta slave, Linda Brent, and the story is more than one of physical survival: It chronicles the preservation of a woman's moral, emotional, and intellectual... |
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| Essay on The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy |
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| The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Hunt for Red October is more than a sleek cloak-and-dagger espionage thriller or the often claustrophobic story of the cat-and-mouse games of military submariners. Tom Clancy's novel seeks not to break these molds, but instead to bring them together in a tale that is just as much about what happens above as well as below the surface. This shifting perspective drives the action and sustains a thematic construction that will become recognizable in Clancy's other works. The central plotline of the novel concerns Soviet submarine commander Marko Ramius and a routine "check-down" mission for the Krasny Oktyabr (Red October), the Soviets' newest and largest Typhoon-class submarine... |
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| Essay on Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez |
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| Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In each of the chapters of this autobiographical novel, Richard Rodriguez keeps an analytic distance as he describes the mostly negative impact of his American education. Rodriguez depicts for us his central California immigrant parents and the ways they created a stable, though very modest, life for their three children. As a child, Rodriguez watches his parents maneuver between a public life in which their Mexican origins render them second-class citizens and a private family life in which their deeply held Mexican values allow the children to flourish. Rodriguez's chief problem as a boy is that he is intelligent, which eventually marks him as a desirable commodity for... |
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| Essay on The Human Comedy by William Saroyan |
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| The Human Comedy by William Saroyan Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Human Comedy is the kind of book that has now gone out of style for all the wrong reasons. Written in 1943, it is a soulful celebration of the humanity of small-town America and of the universal human spirit. Unabashedly uncynical, it was an inspiration to wartime America and became a best-seller upon publication. Its protagonists, the Macauley family, are simple on the surface but worldly-wise and compassionate down deep. In the novel, Saroyan uses place and character names such as Homer and Ulysses that recall the grandeur of the Greek epics. Like his main characters, Saroyan employs simple language to talk about deeper truths. The book, short in length and understated in style... |
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| Essay on How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez |
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| How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Winner of the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and selected as one of the Best Books of 1991 by Library Journal, this novel remains one of Julia Alvarez's most popular works of fiction. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is a novel composed of 15 interlinked stories that recount the process of acculturation of the Garcia family, specifically that of the four sisters, Carla, Sandi, Yolanda, and Sofia (Fifi), after they immigrate to New York from the Dominican Republic. The novel opens with Yolanda, a teacher and writer, returning to her family in the Dominican Republic in her mid-30s and contemplating a permanent relocation. This section... |
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| Essay on The House without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers |
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| The House without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The House without a Key is known as the first of six Charlie Chan detective novels written by Earl Derr Biggers between 1925 and 1933. It was, however, conceived as the first (and last) John Quincy Winterslip detective novel. Most of the novel is narrated from the point of view of the young Bostonian who finds himself sent on a mission similar to that of another Bostonian, Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. But instead of traveling to Old Europe, John Quincy must travel to Honolulu to recall his Brahmin aunt to her senses and escort her home. (Aunt Minerva provides the only other point of view in the narration.) It is John Quincy's uncle Dan who is murdered... |
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| Essay on The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros |
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| The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Sandra Cisneros's young protagonist, Esperanza, is trapped in the concrete landscape of the Chicago barrio in The House on Mango Street. In this collection of highly autobiographical, interconnected vignettes, Cisneros claims she writes as a "reaction against those people who want to make our barrios look like Sesame Street, or someplace really warm and beautiful!" (Cisneros, "Solitary," 69). Growing up poor in Mexico and Chicago with six brothers, Cisneros, like her young narrator, learned how "poor neighborhoods lose their charm after dark." Writing Mango Street is Cisneros's way of documenting this reality of her upbringing. Like Cisneros, Esperanza also turns to writing to... |
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| Essay on The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne |
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| The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published one year after his widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables represents Hawthorne's attempt to write, in his words, a "sunnier" book. In its famous preface, Hawthorne explicitly identifies Gables as a "romance," a term he uses to denote a quasi-fantastic blend of realism and allegorical symbolism. For Hawthorne, the "romance" provided the ideal form in which an artist might "paint" the moral nature of humankind. As in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's painting here depicts the corrupting and isolating effects of sinful pride. The specific symbolism of the text is too dense to summarize effectively, but a few remarks... |
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| Essay on The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton |
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| The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The House of Mirth marks the beginning of the major phase of Edith Wharton's career as a novelist. By the time it appeared in 1905, Wharton had already published, among other works, a highly successful book on interior design, The Decoration of Houses (written with Ogden Codman, 1897); a collection of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899); a novella, The Touchstone (1900); and a historical novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). It was The House of Mirth, however, that established the subject matter of Old New York society with which Wharton would be consistently associated and the "discipline of the daily task" that turned her from "a drifting amateur into a professional"... |
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| Essay on House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski |
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| House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The novel House of Leaves is multilayered and at times a perplexing enigma, but, thanks to Mark Z. Danielewski's gifts with narrative, the mystery remains legible and compelling. Central to the book's conceit of verisimilitude is the existence of a documentary film about one Will Navidson's experience with a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. The house's existence is more than a simple question of fact versus fiction, because our narrator and editor Johnny Truant is suspicious of the documentary's existence as well. Truant is assembling the scattered notes of the recently deceased Zampano, who has been preparing a critical exegesis of the film, but as Johnny... |
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| Essay on House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday |
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| House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1969, emphasizes the importance of choosing words responsibly and appreciating the value, or necessity, of silence. The story of the protagonist, Abel, along with the story of his people and the society that keeps them suspended between a stereotyped myth and mind-numbing reality, depends in part on its own creation through what is or is not told. Creation, destruction, time, and space shift under Abel's feet as he runs from Walatowa, New Mexico, to Los Angeles, then back again to the vast landscapes of the Canon de San Diego. Thus the opening passage in the novel's prologue in which Abel runs across the plains... |
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| Essay on Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson |
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| Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson's first novel, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award, and was nominated for others, including the Pulitzer Prize. More than 20 years passed before her second novel, Gilead, was published, in 2004, but Robinson wrote two books of nonfiction, Mother Country (1989) and The Death of Adam (2000). Housekeeping was made into a feature film in 1987 starring Christine Lahti and directed by Bill Forsyth. Reviewers, general readers, and critics have reached a near consensus that "Robinson writes powerfully, evocatively and beautifully" (Macguire, 11). In the first two decades following Housekeeping's publication, more than 70 critical... |
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| Essay on The House behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chesnutt |
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| The House behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chesnutt Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Charles W. Chesnutt's fiction is both interesting and unique, as he presents scenes of local color from an African-American perspective. Chesnutt is careful in all his writing not to offend the sensibilities of his reading audience, even if this means endorsing some of the predominant racial misconceptions of his day. Like many other African-American authors of this time, Chesnutt was never afforded full literary freedom, and his writing often reflects this constraint. Among his many works of fiction, The House behind the Cedars stands out as a powerful yet puzzling examination of the moral implications of passing, racial theorizing, and miscegenation in the rural South... |
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| Essay on The Hours by Michael Cunningham |
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| The Hours by Michael Cunningham Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Michael Cunningham's The Hours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction in 1999, is a contemporary version of Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, akin to a "riff" on an older musical score, according to the author (Young, 33). The novel was made into a 2002 Miramax film directed by Stephen Daldry; it garnered a host of nominations and awards, including an Academy Award win for Best Actress (Nicole Kidman). Cunningham's other novels include A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood, which "chart the trajectory of male protagonists from unhappy nuclear families to 'alternative' family arrangements" (Young, 14). Though addressing... |
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| Essay on The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving |
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| The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. John Irving's fifth novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, published in 1981, is the story of the unconventional Berry family. The novel received mixed reviews from critics upon its publication although it was certainly popular. It was a best-seller, a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, a Time magazine cover story, and spurred a film adaptation. The novel's narrator, John Berry, traces the history of his family, beginning in the summer of 1939 with the meeting of his parents, Win and Mary, at Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, a resort in Maine where both young adults are working. The two fall in love, and Win meets a zany bear trainer named Freud and a man in a white dinner jacket whose image plagues Win... |
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| Essay on Hope Leslie by Catharine Maria Sedgwick |
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| Hope Leslie by Catharine Maria Sedgwick Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Written in 1827, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie offers a fascinating exploration of the American character, specifically, that of the American female. The novel blends the conventions of romance--a tale of love among the Puritans--with historical realism, in this case the subjugation of the American Indian Pequod tribe by the early settlers. Sedgwick thus combines two remarkable achievements in her novel: She creates a romantic page-turner that ignites compassion and understanding for the Native American at a time when Indians were reviled. Like her contemporary James Fenimore Cooper, Sedgwick was conscious of creating an American past; and like the latter, she... |
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| Essay on Honey in the Horn by H. L. Davis |
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| Honey in the Horn by H. L. Davis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When H. L. Davis was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, Honey in the Horn (1935), it might have made him a major voice in the emerging "new" literature of the American West. But Davis entered into a prolonged contractual dispute with his publisher, and despite the financial security provided by the commercial success of his novel, his troubled first marriage failed, throwing his personal life into turmoil. His next novel would not appear until 1947, when another group of Western American novelists--most notably Walter Van Tilburg Clark, A. B. Guthrie Jr., and Wallace Stegner--had come to the fore and had eclipsed Davis and several other significant figures of the 1930s. In any case... |
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| Essay on Home to Harlem by Claude McKay |
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| Home to Harlem by Claude McKay Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Often cited as the first African-American best-seller, Home to Harlem is the first and best-known work of Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay's four volumes of fiction. Perhaps most widely recognized for his sonnet "If We Must Die" (1919), which was written in response to widespread black lynchings, McKay originally wrote Home to Harlem as a short story illustrating the "so-called semi-underworld" of the urban American black in the 1920s, "leaving no subject, however degraded, untouched" (Cooper, 212). McKay's novel, which depicts the seamier sides of life for Harlem's working-class blacks, was published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, at a time when other black writers, such as... |
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| Essay on Herzog by Saul Bellow |
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| Herzog by Saul Bellow Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In his 1976 Nobel lecture, Saul Bellow said, "We stand open to all anxieties. The decline and fall of everything is our daily dread, we are agitated in private life and tormented by public questions" (Bellow, "Nobel Lecture," par. 16). In many ways, this statement aptly describes Moses E Herzog, the main character of Herzog, the imaginatively brilliant novel that Bellow had published 12 years earlier. Not only is Herzog's life wrought with anxiety (real and imagined) in personal and social affairs, but the novel also portrays him agonizing over philosophical and religious issues to resolve that dread. The basic plot of the story as one critic sums it is as follows: A man, Moses Herzog, spends a week... |
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| Essay on HERmione by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) |
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| HERmione by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. HERmione is a posthumously published autobiographical novel describing, in often rhapsodic prose, the overwrought thoughts and feelings of a young woman on the verge of discovering her vocation as a poet. A welter of heightened moments, rather than a sustained plot, concern her intimate relationships with an inspiring yet intimidating, established poet, George Lowndes (a fictive version of Ezra Pound) and a bisexual woman, Fayne Rabb (Frances Josepha Gregg), who functions as a kind of muse. As the typography signals, HERmione is a narrative about identity--about splits in identity, identities contained within identities, and ultimately about a dominant, primordial self or archetype... |
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| Essay on Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
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| Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's novel Herland presents a "feminist utopia," in which Gilman counters a masculine tradition of writing that had long been defined through patriarchy and a functioning hierarchical system that maintained order. While many critics have examined Herland strictly in terms of feminist critical theory--for example, drawing upon the work of Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice as a lens through which to see the novel--others have stressed Gilman's destabilization of gender and rejection of exaggerated notions of learned or biological sexual difference by deconstructing the binary opposition of male/female. Gilman's work is closely tied to her... |
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| Essay on Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow |
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| Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Saul Bellow's fifth and least-discussed novel, Henderson the Rain King (Michelson, 309) successfully combines the drama of an adventure tale, the emotional maturing and development of the protagonist typical of the bildungsroman, and the comical, often unreliable narration of a roguish trickster typical of a picaresque novel. Henderson the Rain King features 55-year-old narrator Eugene Henderson, a man of gargantuan proportions and a protagonist who, as with so many of Bellow's fictional heroes, is ridden by self-doubt and a sense of spiritual isolation. His eccentric performances are equal to his egocentric worldview--but he is not entirely devoid of introspection... |
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| Essay on The Heart of Hyacinth by Onoto Watanna |
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| The Heart of Hyacinth by Onoto Watanna Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In The Heart of Hyacinth, Onoto Watanna (pseudonym of the writer Winnifred Eaton) examines modern issues of racial identity and feminism within the genre of Victorian romance. Originally published in 1903, the novel's contemporary popularity was due to its sentimental love story set in an exotic en vogue Orientalist idealization of Japan replete with cherry blossoms, temple bells, and quaint mythology. The novel opens with a version of the Madame Butterfly story, already popularized by David Belasco's play: An English sailor marries shy village maiden Aoi but dies abroad, leaving his devoted widow to raise their son, Komazawa, or Koma, in an English-speaking Christian household... |
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| Essay on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers |
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| The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When Carson McCullers' first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, appeared in 1940, the young author caused a literary sensation. Critics, reviewers, and the reading public were surprised by the talent that this young Georgia writer of 23 showed, especially regarding her almost unnatural understanding of the human condition. McCullers was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, a southern mill town that would serve as the perfect model for her novel's setting, with its almost endless catalog of character types. The novel presents a fairly typical plot--that of four characters who are searching for various things in their own lives--with an unusually insightful and extremely intriguing... |
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| Essay on A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells |
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| A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Looking back over his long career, William Dean Howells acknowledged that A Modern Instance (1882) was his favorite novel of all those he had written but A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) was his "most vital" (Cady, 101). It was surely his most ambitious and comprehensive. One seeks in vain for a plot in this all-embracing novel, a complex of personal and professional relations developed centripetally around a unifying core. The setting is New York City in the 1880s; by then New York had supplanted Boston as America's literary and artistic center, as well as established itself as the nation's hub of business and finance. New York was also drawing immigrants by the tens of... |
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| Essay on The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson |
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| The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Featuring Eleanor Vance, one of Shirley Jackson's most emotionally isolated but realistically drawn characters, The Haunting of Hill House is one of her most critically acclaimed novels, perhaps second only to We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). This novel demonstrates Jackson's sustained interest in both the supernatural and the nature of old houses; reviewers praised it for the realistically drawn characters, for Jackson's ability to build suspense, and for her well-timed use of comic relief. Appearing on the best-seller lists of 1959 and subsequently published in numerous foreign editions, in 1963 The Haunting of Hill House was made into a critically acclaimed... |
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| Essay on Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski |
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| Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Narratives of cruelty and alienation are delivered in the biting tones of sarcasm and comedy in Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye. The novel explores the childhood and adolescence of Bukowski's alter ego, outcast Henry Chinaski, crowding the pages with poignant memories of painful relationships, disfiguring acne, and early alcoholism. Throughout the novel, these elements combine to fill Chinaski's childhood with pain and anger. In particular, his relationship with his father, violent and traumatic, is recounted in narratives of beatings, verbal abuse, ostracism, and embarrassment: "Wherever we went, he got into arguments with people" (26). The trauma of these episodes is also echoed in Bukowski's...
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| Essay on The Group by Mary McCarthy |
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| The Group by Mary McCarthy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Group by Mary McCarthy soared to the number-one position on the New York Times best-seller list within its first week in print (Gelderman, 250). However, the novel was not critically acclaimed. For many critics, including Norman Mailer, the book was an "embarrassing failure" (Stock, 244). McCarthy's reputation as a New York intellectual never recovered from the publication of The Group and its critical reception as a woman's magazine book. The book was also banned in Italy, Ireland, and Australia as an "offense to public morals" (Brightman, 486). Although every "major film studio had considered [The Group] and turned it down" before publication, in 1966 the book rights were bought by Charles Feldman... |
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| Essay on Grendel by John Gardner |
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| Grendel by John Gardner Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In his most acclaimed and well-known literary work, John Gardner retells the story of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster Grendel. Although written early in his literary career, Grendel was not Gardner's first novel. It was, however, the novel that solidified his position as a major American literary figure. One could argue that it is appropriate to consider Grendel not only as a retelling of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, but also as a sort of "prequel" to it. Although Grendel's combat with his vanquisher functions, ultimately, as the climax of Gardner's book, Beowulf himself doesn't show up until six-sevenths of the way through Grendel. The remainder of the narrative is devoted to the... |
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| Essay on The Green Mile by Stephen King |
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| The Green Mile by Stephen King Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Stephen King is a pop cultural icon, a writer of the macabre who brings to the page nightmarish studies that cut directly to the heart of societal fears. From a haunted hotel gripping the darkest aspects of our individual nature (The Shining), to the ultimate question of the fate of society as a whole (The Stand), King seeks to address questions that hold no immediate answers and spawn terror in the very nature of those silences. In The Green Mile, originally published as a serial text much in the Victorian style of writers such as Charles Dickens, King explores the themes of humanity, racism, and the death penalty in the context of a nonintrusive Christian discourse. Through the story... |
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| Essay on The Great Meadow by Elizabeth Madox Roberts |
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| The Great Meadow by Elizabeth Madox Roberts Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Great Meadow, published in 1930, is the fourth of Elizabeth Madox Roberts's seven novels, and its qualities reflect the striking and often misunderstood originality of her voice. The story takes place in the late 18th century and follows the early pioneers, under the leadership of Daniel Boone and other legendary figures, across the perilous Appalachian Mountains into "the west," or Kentucky. The author's ancestors were among those who made this journey and settled near Fort Harrod, which would provide the setting for part of The Great Meadow. Roberts grew up in the small Kentucky town of Springfield, not far from the site of Fort Harrod. Ill health was a constant in her life... |
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| Essay on The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald |
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| The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Considered by many critics and readers to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby analyzes and exposes the shallow foundations of the American dream, 1920s style. Peopling his novel with New York characters--all, significantly, reared in the heartland of the United States but currently living in the fictitious Long Island villages of East Egg or West Egg--Fitzgerald demonstrates that each has lost his or her innocence and perverted the original vision of an Edenic America. Brooding shadowlike over the early part of the novel, the mysterious and fabulously wealthy host of numerous West Egg parties, is Jay Gatsby--born James Gatz--who gradually comes... |
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| Essay on Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon |
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| Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Thomas Pynchon's third novel, Gravity's Rainbow, appearing in February 1973, was immediately compared to such novels as Melville's Moby-Dick and Joyce's Ulysses. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the 760-page novel caused such disagreement among the judges and the trustees that for the first and only time in its history, the Pulitzer Prize in literature was not awarded. The author himself has never accepted an award, given an interview, or otherwise publicly commented on his novels. Critics, though often disturbed by the book's vast array of flat characters, its sophomoric vulgarity, and its complexity of situations and themes, were largely impressed, hailing it as the Great American Novel... |
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| Essay on The Grass Dancer by Susan Power |
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| The Grass Dancer by Susan Power Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Grass Dancer won the 1995 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction for Susan Power, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux nation. The novel traces the lives of generations of North Dakota Sioux back and forth in time from 1864 to 1982. The Grass Dancer draws upon the traditional stories of Deer Woman to accomplish what the scholar James Ruppert suggests is the goal of some Native American writers: to "shift the paradigm" (Ruppert, 150) of Native and non-Native readers so that both have an appreciation for each other's perspectives. The Dakota versions of the Deer Woman stories were recorded by Ella Deloria, Nakota Sioux ethnologist, and published in 1932. Traditionally, Deer Woman... |
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| Essay on Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin |
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| Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published in 1953, Baldwin's autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, tells the story of John Grimes, the 14-year-old protagonist who struggles to find his own identity within his family's dynamics. We meet John on his birthday, a Saturday in March 1935. Through his journey to see a movie and find his brother, Roy, readers develop a sense of his character. John confronts his struggles as the plot develops--Baldwin divides the text into three sections: "The Seventh Day," "The Prayers of the Saints," and "The Threshing-Floor." In addition, Baldwin further divides "The Prayers of the Saints" into three sections: "Florence's Prayer," "Gabriel's Prayer," and... |
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| Essay on The Good Earth by Pearl Buck |
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| The Good Earth by Pearl Buck Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, winner of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into an enormous number of languages and has remained in print continuously into the new millennium. It is the first novel in a trilogy, House of Earth. The second, Sons (1932), follows the three sons of Wang Lung in their roles as merchant, warlord, and rich man, while the third, A House Divided (1935), depicts the eventual decline of the family as they experience war, famine, epidemic, and, finally, revolution. The Good Earth, usually considered the best of the three, is memorable both for its content, which introduced Americans to various classes of Chinese people, and for its simple, almost biblical style... |
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| Essay on A Good Day to Die by James Harrison |
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| A Good Day to Die by James Harrison Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Jim Harrison's second novel, A Good Day to Die, focuses on the transgressions of society toward an ever-shrinking wilderness and sets forth a conservationist doctrine that the author would refine over the next 30 years in both his fiction and his poetry (and that he first articulated in Wolf: A False Memoir [1971], his first novel). The novel has been compared to Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), though few sources credit Harrison with preceding Abbey's cult classic by two years. The main event around which A Good Day to Die revolves is the damming of an Idaho river by the American government and an attempt by two hapless characters bent on self-destruction to keep the country... |
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| Essay on Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell |
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| Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Margaret Mitchell's only published book, Gone with the Wind, sold 1 million copies in its first six months and has subsequently become one of the best-selling novels of all time. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and was released as a motion picture in 1939. Set in Mitchell's native Georgia just before, during, and after the Civil War, the novel features paired opposites as female protagonists: Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled Southern belle who manipulates men to achieve her goals and learns to survive in the fallen South, and Melanie Wilkes, the ideal Southern lady, whose goodness and purity make her unable to grasp the monumental changes and the rough postwar world. The novel's... |
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| Essay on Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien |
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| Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award in 1979. While the majority of the books listed in this reference text have received major awards, this prize was unusual. Going After Cacciato was not only chosen over John Irving's popular best-seller, The World According to Garp, but also the award was given to a book that unflinchingly examined the insanity of the Vietnam War--a conflict that had come to an end only three years earlier after 10 politically divisive years for the United States. In fact, the wounds of the war were still so fresh that a vast majority of readers and critics believed that a book dealing with the war, written by a foot soldier nonetheless, would be... |
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| Essay on God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell |
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| God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published in the years of the Great Depression, God's Little Acre was an enormous success, selling even more copies than Caldwell's Tobacco Road, which was published the preceding year as a novel and established a record as the Broadway play with the most continuous performances. By this time, Erskine Caldwell had discovered his subject: By writing about the often ignored poor of the South, white and black, he brought them to national attention. As the scholar and critic James E. Devlin suggests, Caldwell, writing just after Theodore Dreiser and simultaneously with Ernest Hemingway and with John Steinbeck, his "exact contemporary," is not known as a "philosophic" writer (Devlin, 50)... |
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| Essay on The Godfather by Mario Puzo |
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| The Godfather by Mario Puzo Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Perhaps no other novel published in the 20th century captured the American public's imagination quite like Mario Puzo's 1969 novel The Godfather. Since its publication, Puzo's third novel has reached legendary status: It has sold more than 21 million copies, was adapted into a blockbuster film that won three Academy Awards in 1972, including best picture, and launched Puzo's career as a best-selling author (Malta). The Godfather chronicles the saga of the Corleone family, a New York Mafia empire, during the late 1940s. The novel centers on the transfer of power in the Corleone family, as Don Vito Corleone, the patriarch of Puzo's crime syndicate, retires and hands the reigns of his criminal... |
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| Essay on The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur |
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| The Girl by Meridel Le Sueur Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl is the story of many of the poor and working poor in Minnesota during the Great Depression. The main character is unnamed, thus functioning as a symbol for all the girls who have been ignored and betrayed by a society with little compassion for the plight of the hungry and homeless. The girl is a simple country girl who travels to St. Paul to find work at the German Village, a bootleg joint run by Belle, Hoinck, and Ack. She falls in love with Butch, an unemployed former baseball player who occasionally works as a scab during strikes. She quickly becomes pregnant by him and resists the attempts of Butch and others to provide an abortion. Gantz, a gangster to whom Belle... |
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| Essay on The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy |
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| The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Continuously in print for more than half a century, J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man has invited controversy since its initial publication by Olympia Press in 1955, when, to Donleavy's dismay, it was printed as part of Olympia's pornographic series. Donleavy launched a vigorous, decades-long lawsuit against Olympia, finally buying the company himself and winning American publication rights for the unexpurgated text in 1965. By 1967 the novel was on college and university course lists and became, for some, the epitome of counterculturism and, therefore, a cult classic. For others, the book describes a comic antihero who speaks for and acts out the more universal post-World War II... |
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| Essay on Giant by Edna Ferber |
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| Giant by Edna Ferber Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Once you encounter Giant, Edna Ferber's sprawling, brawling Texas novel, it is virtually impossible to think about the Lone Star State without thinking also of the novel, the film (equally sprawling, even more brawling), or both. Ferber considered alternative titles for her saga that spans 25 years in the lives of Bick and Leslie Benedict, including "Jillion," "Big Rich," and "No Man Is an Island." But the single word selected best reflects the novel's relentless, larger-than-life dimension, an underlying theme confronting readers on almost every page. Ferber's 1952 portrayal of "modern Texas in the making" generated Texas-size verbal gushers encompassing the state and its people, novel characters... |
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| Essay on The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth |
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| The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer Nathan Zuckerman visits his role model and idol, the reclusive writer E. I. Lonoff. In the first sentence, Roth invites us to read the book as a bildungsroman about the protagonist's development and socialization: "I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman" (3). But because Zuckerman is himself a writer, The Ghost Writer is more properly classified as a Kunstlerroman, or a novel about the development of an artist. Many of Zuckerman's preoccupations stem from the friction his writing has caused in his family and hometown; his father... |
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| Essay on Geek Love by Katherine Dunn |
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| Geek Love by Katherine Dunn Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Geek Love, a National Book Award Finalist, was Katherine Dunn's third novel, published nearly 20 years after the release of her second novel, Truck. Geek Love combines two stories told by the same narrator, Olympia, who is--in a grotesque flourish for which Dunn has become famous--an albino hunchback. The first story is that of Olympia's parents, Al and Lil Binewski. The Binewskis are parents who have genetically manipulated their children through feeding Lil methamphetamines, arsenic, and radioactive isotopes during her pregnancies to breed deformed children to populate and act as employees in the family business--the Binewski Fabulon--a traveling freak show. Their children include... |
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| Essay on From Here to Eternity by James Jones |
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| From Here to Eternity by James Jones Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. James Jones drew from his own army experience as a soldier with a boxing background to write his enormously successful first novel, From Here to Eternity, winner of a National Book Award. The novel is perhaps the quintessential depiction of the pre-World War II army and portrayal of the men who constituted it. Set in Hawaii in the months leading to the Japanese attack, the novel features Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, son of a coal miner, who leaves Harlan, Kentucky, after his parents die and goes "on the bum" until his enlistment. A natural soldier, extraordinary bugler, and excellent boxer, Prewitt believes he has found a home in the military, and becomes a professed... |
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| Essay on A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis |
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| A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Satirical and sprawling, William Gaddis's fourth novel--A Frolic of His Own--directs its energy and focus toward highlighting the absurdity and uncontrolled pervasiveness of the American legal profession/culture during the 1980s. The second of Gaddis's novels to win the National Book Award (1994)--the other, J R in 1975--A Frolic of His Own likewise secured Gaddis the National Book Critics' Circle Award for fiction (1995). In the same vein as his other fictional works, A Frolic of His Own portrays an American society driven by financial and social greed; yet this novel aptly places this within the machinations of the legal profession, problematizing an individual's actions when immersed... |
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| Essay on The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin |
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| The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In Stanley Elkin's comic extravaganza, Ben (son of, in Hebrew) Flesh is bequeathed the ability to borrow money at the prime rate of interest, uses this capacity to invest in multiple franchises, and becomes afflicted with the symptoms of multiple sclerosis (as Elkin did himself in 1970). But the novel's real genius resides in the existential and metaphysical changes rung on the conceit of prime interest and its dialectical meditation on the generic and the idiosyncratic, on marvelous singularity and standardized (and predictable) uniformity. Indeed, the major theme of Elkin's novel is recuperation, in the many senses of the term. For Flesh to recuperate he must recover, through existential... |
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| Essay on The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand |
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| The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Ayn Rand wrote, "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his own absolute" (709). Ayn Rand, born Alisa Rosenbaum, is known as both a novelist and a philosopher. Through two of her novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, she developed and fine-tuned a set of philosophical beliefs she termed "Objectivism." While its validity is still argued by scholars and philosophers alike, objectivism has become an accepted school of thought largely due to the, albeit limited, success of her novels. Published in 1943, The Fountainhead illustrates one man's... |
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| Essay on Flutie by Diane Glancy |
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| Flutie by Diane Glancy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The critic Stuart Hall has asserted that "identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past" (227). Flutie, the eponymous heroine of Diane Glancy's 1998 novel, receives no narratives from either her Cherokee father or her white mother. Neither of her parents can escape the defining limitations of their experience; neither can imagine themselves or their environment more fully. Flutie, however, can. She is beset by stories. For Flutie, everything is alive, everything has a voice; everything tells a story. But, silenced by a traumatic accident in her youth, she cannot articulate the stories that she hears. Glancy's novel... |
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| Essay on The Floating World by Cynthia Kadohata |
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| The Floating World by Cynthia Kadohata Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Floating World, Cynthia Kadohata's first novel, offers a portrait of a Japanese-American family and the protective sense of space they continually recreate as they travel through the western United States of the 1950s, seeking work, community, family connections, and reconciliation with the past. Presented in first-person voice through the perspective of Olivia, who is her mother's daughter from a former lover, the narrative follows the migrations of Olivia, her mother, Mariko, the mother's husband, Charlie-O, their three young sons, and a fiercely spirited yet cantankerous grandmother, Obasan. As Olivia notes, there were three reasons for the family being constantly... |
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| Essay on The Firm by John Grisham |
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| The Firm by John Grisham Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Much of what maintains John Grisham's best-seller status is that his characters ring true as morally admirable. Grisham's protagonists are far from perfect; in fact, many give in to the temptation of marital infidelity or break the law in some way. However, readers sense a moral superiority in Grisham's main characters, and we come to understand their mistakes. In Mitch McDeere of The Firm, readers recognize a good guy with normal goals who learns that his employers are criminals. As usual, Grisham's portrayal of the FBI offers a fairly negative view of government agencies as well-meaning but rather incompetent, as McDeere runs for his life due to an FBI leak. By the novel's end, the principled... |
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| Essay on Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk |
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| Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The 30-year-old narrator of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club feels alive only when surrounded by decrepitude and death. He attends testicular cancer support groups in order to enhance his vitality: by distinguishing himself as much as possible from the sick, he attempts to wrest himself away from a consumerist culture that suppresses death; by exposing himself to the mortality of others (which grants him the knowledge that he also is going to die), every moment of his life becomes more valuable. One of the infinite number of go-betweens in this culture (his job is to determine the expenses of recalling lethally defective automobiles), the narrator yearns to die in an airplane crash... |
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| Essay on Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong |
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| Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Contemporary readers credit Maxine Hong Kingston as the first "woman warrior" in Asian-American letters. Hong Kingston's "talk-stories" might be claimed to be the representative autobiographic account of a Chinese girlhood, but Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) was written before the war in Asia ended, almost three decades prior to the publication of Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1971). In the tradition of Chinese-American women's writing, Fifth Chinese Daughter is acclaimed as the mother text to The Woman Warrior, since Hong Kingston herself has referred to Wong as one of her literary mentors. Fifth Chinese Daughter enjoyed immense popularity in the 1940s... |
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| Essay on The Field of Vision by Wright Morris |
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| The Field of Vision by Wright Morris Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. For this novel, Wright Morris received the National Book Award. It was an early high point in a long and consistently impressive career that warranted more extensive critical attention than it has received. For more than three decades, Morris regularly produced novels of great technical and thematic subtlety and range. Although his work is most associated with the isolated communities on the Nebraskan plains, it is a misconception that he is primarily either a rural or a regional novelist. Morris set many of his novels in other locations in the Midwest, in New England, in the Deep South, in the Southwest, in California, in Mexico, and in several European countries. Many of his characters... |
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| Essay on The Female Man by Joanna Russ |
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| The Female Man by Joanna Russ Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Joanna Russ's science-fiction novel has come to be highly esteemed and influential for the very qualities that kept it from being published for almost four years. First, its biting tone gives voice to an aggressive form of feminism that was alien to the male-dominated science fiction of the time, which was only just coming to terms with more pacific feminist alternative worlds, such as those conceived by Ursula Le Guin. Secondly, its convoluted plot is not only secondary to its "literary" style, in the then controversial manner of 1960s "New Wave" science fiction, but this stylistic experimentation serves to convey a self-reflexive, postmodernist sensibility concerned... |
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| Essay on The Female American by Unca Eliza Winkfield |
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| The Female American by Unca Eliza Winkfield Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When The Female American was first published, it was dismissed as a Robinson Crusoe spin-off (a criticism still leveled today). Daniel Defoe's popular tale of one man's 28-year sojourn on a desert island (1719) had plenty of imitators throughout Europe, so it wouldn't be surprising to find an American colonial writer hoping to add another twist to the tale. But as Michelle Burnham explains in her introduction to the novel, the author's name, nationality, and gender remain a mystery though the novel's protagonist, Unca Eliza Winkfield, is generally named as the author. This becomes particularly important in an encyclopedia about the "American" novel. Published first in London... |
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| Essay on Fear of Flying by Erica Jong |
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| Fear of Flying by Erica Jong Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Creating one of the most enduring literary colloquialisms in the late 20th century, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying remains as polarizing today at it did during its initial 1973 publication. The novel marked Jong's emergence from poet to novelist and opened the doors for women writers everywhere to showcase their own emotions, thoughts, and exploits no matter how sexually explicit and intellectually unorthodox. Jong opened the door for women writers to explore and address desires housed in the female mind and body. Perhaps no other novel written by a woman before or since has captured the mainstream and literary public's attention as brusquely as Fear of Flying. Jong's writing awards... |
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| Essay on The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat |
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| The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In The Farming of Bones, her third book, Edwidge Danticat dramatizes the 1937 massacre of Haitian sugarcane workers in the Dominican Republic under the orders of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Danticat had earlier written about this event in her short story "Nineteen Thirty-Seven," included in the collection Krik? Krak! (1995), a National Book Award finalist. The novel's genesis was a 1995 trip by the author to the site of the massacre, the river that forms the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, now called Massacre River. "I felt like I was standing on top of a huge mass grave, and just couldn't see the bodies," says Danticat in a Publishers Weekly interview... |
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| Essay on Fanny by Erica Jong |
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| Fanny by Erica Jong Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. With her 1980 picaresque novel Fanny, being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, Erica Jong showed the public and literary establishment that she was more than Isadora Wing and the Zipless Fuck from her novel Fear of Flying. Putting her 18th-century English literature education from Columbia University to full use, Jong birthed a new (or not-so-new) character from centuries ago, creating perhaps her best novel so far in her long career of letters. Jong composed the novel, the reader learns at its end, as Fanny's accurate autobiographical account for her adult daughter Belinda who " 'wisht to make a Grand Tour of the Globe . . .", serving not only as a travel guide...
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| Essay on Familiar Heat by Mary Hood |
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| Familiar Heat by Mary Hood Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When Mary Hood published her novel Familiar Heat in 1995, she was already an established short-story writer with two award-winning collections, How Far She Went and And Venus Is Blue. Since her stories often leave readers wanting to discover more about her soulful characters, it made sense that Hood would develop into a talented novelist as well. Unlike the early short stories, which were set primarily in Hood's Georgia surroundings, Familiar Heat takes place on the Florida coast where most of the main characters have immigrated to the small community of Sanavere. In an interview since the novel's publication, Hood admits, "When I go back to the coast now, I have a strong sense of being where... |
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| Essay on Falconer by John Cheever |
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| Falconer by John Cheever Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Ezekiel Farragut, the protagonist of Falconer, would seem to be one of John Cheever's prototypical characters; he has wealth, the suburban home, a beautiful wife, friends, education--all of the ingredients our society requires for success. These ingredients, however, leave him profoundly alienated; his family bequeaths to him a legacy of denial, his friends and marriage are a disaster of superficiality and lies, and "glamour" or adultery, and alcohol and drug abuse are the tools he chooses to escape his life. We meet him, thus, as #734-508-32, an inmate at Falconer Prison, found guilty of fratricide, a heroin addict on a methadone maintenance regimen. Ironically, it is only his experience... |
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| Essay on Falconer by John Cheever » |
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| Essay on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury |
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| Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Ray Bradbury's most widely read novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), has sometimes been compared to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), but it has more in common with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a classic examination of the manipulation of the human mind. All three works express fears of modern, technologically advanced societies by extrapolating contemporary authoritarian and antihumanist trends into the future, not necessarily to predict the inevitable but to sound the alarm. Fahrenheit 451, conceived while the McCarthy hearings were at their height, reflects the paranoid atmosphere of the period, without being or trying to be an allegory of cold war politics. Notably... |
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| Essay on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury » |
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| Essay on Face of an Angel by Denise Chavez |
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| Face of an Angel by Denise Chavez Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Face of an Angel (1994) won the 1995 American Book Award, the Puerto del Sol fiction award, and the 1994 Premio Aztlan award. This great novel is a tribute by a contemporary Chicana writer to a line of women whose voices have given substance and creativity to Chicana literature. This tribute to women also becomes Denise Chavez's narration of a conflict and its development, since these women have played a paradoxical role as transmitters of Chicano culture's oppressive patriarchal dictates. Soveida Dosamantes, a waitress at "El Farol," a New Mexican restaurant, recovers the stories of pain and endurance of her female relatives. Face of an Angel is at the same time a bildungsroman... |
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| Essay on Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates |
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| Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Expensive People is a significant variation from Oates's typical style of writing, for it is written in first person, and Oates also uses satire to develop her commentary on suburban culture rather than relying on plot and characters' actions. The narrator, Richard Everett, drives the plot of the story forward while remaining seated at his typewriter throughout the novel. His "memoir" serves not only as a medium for expunging guilt about events of his life but also expands to describe a critical, though exaggerated, picture of American suburban culture. Beginning his memoir with the simply stated yet deeply loaded words "I was a child murderer," Richard has already stated... |
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| Essay on The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer |
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| The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, which won the Pulitzer Prize, merges two of the writer's career-long preoccupations: murder and celebrity. Neither novel nor journalistic reportage, as these forms have been traditionally understood, this pioneer docu-fiction about the life and death of the murderer Gary Gilmore can be seen in retrospect as the nexus linking early work, such as the deliberately sensationalistic novel An American Dream (about a celebrity who murders his wife [1966]) and such exercises in and about self-promotion as Advertisements for Myself (1959), with latter-day work like his psycho-biographical inquiry into a murder that made for celebrity, Oswald's Tale... |
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| Essay on Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton |
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| Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In 1906 or 1907 in Paris, Edith Wharton hired a tutor to help perfect her French. As an exercise, she wrote a simple, eight-page short story about a rugged New Englander named Ethan Hart (Wolff, 161). Ethan Hart later became Ethan Frome and continued to surprise his creator by supplying her with rich material that she converted into a novel, published serially by Scribner's from August to October 1911, and in book form in September 1911 (Lewis, 308). According to biographers and critics, the novel continued to grow because the author's psyche resonated with the psyches of the characters she called "my granite outcroppings" (Wharton, vii, author's italics), who articulated for Wharton... |
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| Essay on Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis |
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| Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Dedicated to H. L. Mencken "with profound admiration," Lewis's novel portrays an American type Mencken particularly detested, "to wit, the malignant moralist, the Christian turned cannibal, the snorting and preposterous Puritan" (Prejudices: Fifth Series, 1926). Mencken had derided evangelical ministers and vice crusaders for years, but following Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), Mencken urged Lewis to write a satirical novel about the Man of God or the Professional Good Man in America, for he knew that it could discredit this type far more effectively than all the profiles and exposes published in his American Mercury since 1924. Mencken was disappointed when Lewis wrote Arrowsmith... |
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| Essay on The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings |
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| The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. E. E. Cummings may be remembered mostly for his poems, but he also published important prose pieces. His first novel, The Enormous Room, has never been out of print since its initial publication in 1922. That year The Enormous Room joined a core of other benchmark modernist works such as James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Cummings's novel never achieved the critical and historical acclaim that these other works have, but it is significant for its attempt to extend the limits of prose. Critics have noted that Cummings's attempt to bring cubism into novel form, and his structural allusions to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress are entirely consistent with... |
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| Essay on El Bronx Remembered: A Novella And Other Stories by Nicholasa Mohr |
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| El Bronx Remembered: A Novella And Other Stories by Nicholasa Mohr Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Nicholasa Mohr is one of the best Puerto Rican authors in the United States. She was born in Spanish Harlem in 1935 of Puerto Rican immigrants. Her fiction, sometimes based on firsthand information from her own experience, usually narrates the common life of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York barrios. El Bronx Remembered (1975), Nicholasa Mohr's second literary work, follows Nilda in time, an accumulation of 11 short stories and a novella dealing with postwar years and a period of great migration from Puerto Rico. As in other works by Mohr, such as Nilda and In Nueva York, the northern barrio is again the predominant space. Nicholasa Mohr explores the experience... |
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| Essay on El Bronx Remembered: A Novella And Other Stories by Nicholasa Mohr » |
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| Essay on Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Hing Chu |
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| Eat a Bowl of Tea by Louis Hing Chu Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea is a landmark novel about Chinese Americans. Instead of using New York's Chinatown as an exotic backdrop, as earlier novels did, it presents an insider's view of the community, exposing the problems of racism, sexism, patriarchy, and the sterility of the "bachelor society" created by repressive immigration laws. The novel was unsuccessful when it appeared in 1961 (Chu died before the initial print run sold out), receiving poor reviews as its original readers disliked its unromanticized, drab Chinatown of gamblers who exclaim "Wow your mother" and other translations from the earthy Cantonese vernacular. It was rediscovered and reissued, first in 1979... |
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| Essay on Dreaming In Cuban by Cristina Garcia |
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| Dreaming In Cuban by Cristina Garcia Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Images of the ocean pervade Cristina Garcia's debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban, setting the stage for her examination of the dynamic ebb and flow of relationships between several female generations of the Cuban del Pino family. Not coincidentally, this novel opens and closes with the image of Celia, the family matriarch, staring at the sea as she contemplates her life in Cuba. For her, the sea represents both literally and figuratively the distance between her and her daughter, Lourdes, who lives in New York City with her daughter, Pilar. Unlike her daughter who gratefully traversed the Atlantic Ocean in order to secure her freedom from Cuba's communist dictatorship, Celia is content... |
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| Essay on Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream by Kathy Acker |
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| Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream by Kathy Acker Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream along with Empire of the Senseless (1988), marks the middle point of Kathy Acker's short, masochistic career as a literary artist, which began after the suicide of her mother in 1974 and ended with her own premature death in 1997 from breast cancer. Like most of her work (she wrote poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, rock lyrics, and even an opera libretto), Don Quixote is filled with the same violent and sexual trademarks that highlight her own life from suicides to abortions. The story of a woman on a quest to become a knight, Don Quixote takes the reader on a mental and physical trip through the highlights of western European and American... |
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| Essay on Donald Duk by Frank Chin |
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| Donald Duk by Frank Chin Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In pioneering playwright and polemicist Frank Chin's first novel, Donald Duk, the 12-year-old eponymous protagonist, Donald, lives in San Francisco's Chinatown and suffers from a severe case of ethnic self-hatred. He is embarrassed and ashamed by all things Chinese--his family, his neighborhood, his culture, and most of all, his name--and wishes he could escape into the black-and-white films of Fred Astaire, Donald's hero and imaginary friend. Although Chin has previously decried Asian-American writers and novels that deal with themes of identity crisis, he apparently changed his mind and decided to write a narrative focused on a Chinese-American boy's coming-of-age and coming to terms with... |
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| Essay on The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow |
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| The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Preceded by Mountain Path (1936) and Hunter's Horn (1949), The Dollmaker is the final novel in Arnow's Kentucky Trilogy. It remained on the best-seller list for 31 weeks, edging out William Faulkner's A Fable and Eudora Welty's The Ponder Heart to tie for best novel of the year in the Saturday Review's national critics' poll, and was runner-up to A Fable for the National Book Award. Nearly 15 years later, novelist and critic Joyce Carol Oates was so moved by The Dollmaker that she stated in the New York Times that "criticism seems almost irrelevant" for such a "masterpiece" (Oates, 57). The novel details the journey of Gertie Nevels and her family from their hardscrabble existence... |
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| Essay on Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn |
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| Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Jessica Hagedorn's novel takes place late in the Philippine dictator Marcos's regime. She gathers a host of varied characters whose lives converge purposefully and accidentally in the midst of family feuds, political intrigue, assassination, and rebellion. One of the central characters, Rio Gonzaga, is a teenager living in the United States, who remembers her childhood in the Philippines with both nostalgia and antipathy. She lived a life of privilege but is keenly aware that belonging to the upper class includes unpleasant realities such as corrupt relatives and toadies. The other major character, Joey Sands, comes from the other end of the class spectrum; he is the son of a prostitute... |
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| Essay on Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone |
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| Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Robert Stone's second novel, Dog Soldiers, is, on the surface, a fictional account of the impact of the Vietnam War on the American psyche. It also stretches beyond this to examine the violence endemic in American culture so that the war becomes a metaphor for internal national conflict. It won the National Book Award and was later adapted to film as Who'll Stop the Rain? in 1978, which starred Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld. The epigraph of Dog Soldiers is drawn from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and acts as a knowing allusion to the disastrous effects of colonial power. These effects are extended by Stone to encompass the site of war as well as the United States. Because of this, the war becomes... |
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| Essay on Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis |
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| Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Dodsworth is the last work of Sinclair Lewis's great period of the 1920s, an era during which Lewis published influential novels such as Main Street (1922), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927) before winning the Nobel Prize in 1930. Lewis's main characters to this point had been of two types: ineffectual idealists opposed to the shams and hypocrisies of the social systems of which they were a part, or selfdeluding characters whose lack of insight allowed them to cling to and perpetuate these systems. For example, idealists like Carol Kennicott, who fights against the restrictions and uniformity of Main Street, or Martin Arrowsmith, who protests the compromised scientific... |
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| Essay on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick |
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| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Philip K. Dick's novel deserves to be better known than as the story behind the film Blade Runner (directed by Ridley Scott, released in 1982), whose cult status has done much to liberate his work from the marketing ghetto of sci-fi pulp and to prompt the making of many other films based on or inspired by his paranoid extrapolation of emerging technologies. The film narrowed the focus to enhance romance and pathos. But Dick's parable of the future commodification of animals, both organic and electronic, functions as a critique of present-day capitalist economics. To understand this, one must understand the symbolic functions and meanings of animals in his post-apocalyptic... |
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| Essay on Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha |
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| Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Dictee is among the most challenging of what might be called "postmodern" texts. Written in multiple genres, Dictee resists any easy categorization, and its narrative structure and language break conventional rules. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's innovative use of narrative and language is in part related to her immigrant experience of exile, and to the history of Korea's colonization by Japan. But the book as a whole entails a much wider range of themes and narratives than those concerning the immigrant experience or Korean history. Rather than plot or characterization, the book is structured and driven by two interlocking, recurring, thematic concerns--language and gender... |
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| Essay on The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac |
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| The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Written late in Jack Kerouac's life, The Dharma Bums revisits the infamous picaresque style of On The Road; it is the subtle changes that Kerouac makes to this form, however, that make the novel of particular interest. The Dharma Bums, is a much more figurative recollection of actual events than On the Road. Much like Kerouac's earlier works, the events of the The Dharma Bums unfold in a linear manner as the reader traces the protagonist's travels from coast to coast. However, Kerouac shows inventiveness and mastery in removing particular parts of "reality" from an actual series of events and crafting them into a fictional narrative. As with many of his previous works, Kerouac uses his... |
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| Essay on Devil In A Blue Dress by Walter Mosley |
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| Devil In A Blue Dress by Walter Mosley Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. With Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley came to the fore as a formidable writer of detective fiction. A former president of the Mystery Writers of America, Mosley uses his knowledge of Los Angeles in his novels to take detective fiction in a new direction. Mosley's first novel relates the story of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, a black man hired to use his familiarity with the black social scene in 1940s Los Angeles to find Daphne Monet, a white woman who tends to move in black social circles. Recently fired from his job, Easy is forced into this shadowy world by his desire to maintain ownership of his house. Despite his reluctance, Easy accepts the job arranged by his friend Joppy and offered... |
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| Essay on Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams |
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| Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In the author's note to Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams writes that her novel is based on two historical incidents involving women: a pregnant black woman who helped lead a slave uprising in 1829 in Kentucky whose execution was delayed until after the birth of her baby, and a white woman who was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves on her plantation in North Carolina in 1830. Dessa Rose is based on the fictional premise of what could have happened had these two women met. Written in the genre of the neo-slave narrative, a genre comprising contemporary narratives that reimagine slavery, such as Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage... |
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| Essay on Democracy: An American Novel by Henry Adams |
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| Democracy: An American Novel by Henry Adams Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In 1996 Primary Colors, a roman a clef about President Clinton's campaign from someone close enough to observe its inner workings, was published anonymously. The book was widely read and created a cottage industry dedicated to guessing the author's name. Eventually, reporter Joe Klein admitted he was the author. However, this was not the first time that happened. In 1880, Democracy, a roman a clef about President Grant's administration by someone who knew its inner secrets, was also published anonymously. The book was widely read, but the author's name, Henry Adams, was not revealed until 1909 (1217). The Washington National Opera produced Democracy... |
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| Essay on Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty |
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| Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. As the title implies, Delta Wedding records the wedding preparations of a Mississippi plantation family. In this early novel, we see Eudora Welty's trademark fascination with family, place, and the conflict between the individual and the community. Welty said that she chose to set this novel in 1923 because nothing remarkable, such as war, depression, or flood, had happened then. Perhaps she also attempted to capture a time just before industrialization and racial tension changed the South forever. Her delta is an idyllic setting, where the land shimmers "like the wing of a lighted dragonfly." The family name, Fairchild, suggests privilege, happiness, and innocence... |
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| Essay on Deliverance by James Dickey |
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| Deliverance by James Dickey Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. For more than 30 years, James Dickey's first novel, Deliverance, has reverberated throughout American culture in general and southern literature in particular. Revolving around a single shocking scene of male sodomy and rape, the novel has presented a source of general unease to readers and critics alike. Moreover, the novel's central question--what really is delivered from what--is only implicitly answered. In many ways, the novel is a moral quagmire, with readers left feeling ambivalent about a human ingression into a wilderness both physical and metaphysical. The plot of Deliverance is deceptively straightforward: four friends, of varying physical strength and integrity, encounter humanity... |
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| Essay on The Deerslayer; Or, The First Warpath by James Fenimore Cooper |
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| The Deerslayer; Or, The First Warpath by James Fenimore Cooper Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Deerslayer comes first in the narrative cycle that comprises Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, though it was the last of these novels to be composed. Cooper had originally intended to write only three books about his hero Natty Bumppo (The Pioneers, 1823; The Last Of The Mohicans, 1826; The Prairie, 1827), but financial circumstances required Cooper, late in his life, to return to his popular and commercially successful Leatherstocking series. He wrote The Pathfinder in 1840 and The Deerslayer in 1841; Cooper died 10 years later, in early 1851. The timeframe of the novel immediately predates The Last of the Mohicans, and the story "introduces" the characters... |
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| Essay on The Deerslayer; Or, The First Warpath by James Fenimore Cooper » |
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| Essay on Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett |
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| Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published in 1877, Sarah Orne Jewett's first booklength work, Deephaven, is not a novel in the conventional sense. Many of the sketches that make up the work were previously published in The Atlantic Monthly (Gale, 69). Yet, as Jewett biographer Elizabeth Silverthorne notes, it is more than a collection of sketches or short stories. Though the work defies easy characterization, it is classified with her novels (80). Generally considered an example of American regionalism, Deephaven is as much about the fictional Maine port town that gives the book its name as it is about its two protagonists, Bostonians Kate Lancaster and Helen Denis. Deephaven is isolated, located some distance from the railroad... |
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| Essay on The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. Macdonald |
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| The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. Macdonald Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Travis McGee, the hero of John D. MacDonald's groundbreaking mystery The Deep Blue Good-by, is a moralizer who waxes on about the wonders of Florida's coast, and about the nature of the human race. At one particularly bleak point, McGee looks down from an airplane and muses, "The worst thing about having a hundred and eighty million people is looking down and seeing how much room there is for more" (121). The novel, however, which is the first in a series of 21, does not set out to be a great social tome. Instead, it is a hard-boiled detective novel--one that crosses genres with a main character of great morality and intelligence, in addition to the brute strength necessary to conquer... |
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| Essay on A Death in the Family by James Agee |
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| A Death in the Family by James Agee Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Author James Agee first became well known for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a collaborative work with photographer Walker Evans in which the two documented the lives of southern sharecroppers. But it is only partly because of this association with photography that Agee's writing style is often described as "photographic." In his posthumously published masterpiece, A Death in the Family, Agee works his characters through a family tragedy in heart-wrenchingly microscopic detail. Told primarily from the perspective of the child Rufus, the story is the semiautobiographical account of a young family--Jay, Mary, and their two children Rufus and Catherine--dealing with the accidental... |
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| Essay on The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West |
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| The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Day of the Locust was the fourth and final novel Nathanael West wrote before his death in an automobile accident the following year. It is West's Hollywood novel, the most significant literary fruit of his move to Southern California to supplement his meager earnings from his novels by writing screenplays, mostly for low-budget films produced at second-rate studios. The novel portrays the tawdry side of Tinseltown that West knew best, picking up on the theme of a homegrown American fascist movement that he had explored in his previous novel A Cool Million (1934). This time he located the seeds of this movement in the betrayals of Hollywood's dream factory. Despite glowing... |
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| Essay on Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley |
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| Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley examines the destruction of working-class families and individuals in early 1900s America. Focusing on the character of Marie, the novel shows a farming family leaving the supportive (but socially restrictive) community of farmers to look for a rise in fortune by mining in Colorado. Marie is a precocious and imaginative child who cannot tolerate what she sees as the bondage of womanhood. Her mother's life is one of powerlessness and killing drudgery; her father is free to squander his earnings and those of his family. As he breaks apart under the dangerous and oppressive work conditions he experiences, Marie's father looks to his family as his sole opportunity... |
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| Essay on Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson |
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| Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Dark Laughter, published in 1925, was Sherwood Anderson's first popular success. Of Anderson's novels, Dark Laughter "perhaps makes the most comprehensive effort to unify the complex concerns of his fiction: individual fulfillment, sexual freedom, artistic development, even national destiny" (Holtz, 135). However, even contemporary critics recognized the stylistic shortcomings of Anderson's prose, which he derived from James Joyce's Ulysses, published just a few years earlier (Howe, 197). A modern reading of Anderson's book may elicit many fruitful glimpses into the world of the Roaring Twenties. Anderson's account in Dark Laughter represents an acute look at the direct... |
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| Essay on Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury |
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| Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In the novel Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury employs that fantasy world of children to show the coming of age of a young boy during the summer of 1928. Bradbury cleverly uses the loss of innocence of a young boy the summer before the nation's loss of innocence after the 1929 stock market crash. Black Tuesday in 1929 brought death to an American lifestyle. The crash plunged the country into the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Americans struggled to find a way to survive. (Mengeling, 878). After 1929, Bradbury was uprooted from his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, to move with his family to look for stable work. His Midwestern small town existence then switched to a very different life in... |
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| Essay on The Dahomean by Frank Yerby |
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| The Dahomean by Frank Yerby Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. With 33 novels to his credit, Frank Yerby (1916-91) is the most prolific African-American novelist to date, yet he receives little attention in the academy. Even during the height of his publishing success, his production of best-sellers, which continuously featured white protagonists, and his professed lack of interest in writing protest fiction earned the disdain or disregard of scholars whose focus was African-American writing. The fact that he wrote popular, formulaic fiction (what he called costume novels) also disqualified him from serious attention from most literary critics in spite of his subversive revisions of received history. Because Yerby addresses black culture in a compelling... |
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| Essay on The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton |
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| The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Edith Wharton was thought to be "voicing anti-American sentiments" and exalting French culture (Dwight, 167) in The Custom of the Country to justify her move from America to France. But the objects of criticism in the novel are American materialism and the way it influences marriage practices of American women. Tracing the root of the heroine Undine Spragg's crudity, Susan Goodman points out that "an indictment of irresponsibly permissive child-rearing practices" has been overlooked (Goodman, 62). Published in 1913, The Custom of the Country shows how an ambitious and materialistic girl, Undine Spragg, gains amusement and success by marrying different men in succession. Having divorced... |
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| Essay on The Crying Of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon |
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| The Crying Of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 embodies the postmodern exploration so prevalent in American fiction of the mid-20th century. In the novel, Pynchon plays upon such postmodern themes as conspiracy theories, paranoia, the challenge of a central government's authority and omniscience, underground rebellions staged quietly yet aggressively, the deterioration of personal relationships, and the general state of confusing decay in America. He does so through his satirical examination of the subculture of Southern California. He mixes metaphors and modern media such as television, radio, and rock-and-roll music as he weaves an intricate and sometimes disorienting... |
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| Essay on Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner |
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| Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. It is appropriate, perhaps, that the last of Wallace Stegner's 28 novels is titled Crossing to Safety, with its hints of the balmy security of a beatific afterlife. But though this graceful novel does deal sensitively with its characters' passage to death, it concentrates more vividly on what allows them to live: reaching across to one another. Crossing to Safety sketches the quiet but remarkable story of the enduring friendship of two couples, Larry and Sally Morgan and Sid and Charity Lang, who meet as Larry and Sid are beginning academic careers in Wisconsin during the Great Depression. Larry, the narrator, and Sally are struggling, unconnected westerners; Sid and Charity... |
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| Essay on The Country of The Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett |
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| The Country of The Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Between 1870 and 1910, American literary realism shared the scene with two tangentially related genres, naturalism and regionalism, or local-color fiction. Although regionalism, with its often romantic and ideal depiction of past and place, is frequently discussed as the opposite of realistic fiction, the two share two common features: a preoccupation with a precise depiction of ordinary human beings and their surrounding environment, and an analysis of the influence of those surroundings on human behavior. Sarah Orne Jewett, in her picturesque description of Dunnet Landing, Maine, in The Country of the Pointed Firs, draws on these elements to create a snapshot... |
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| Essay on Corregidora by Gayl Jones |
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| Corregidora by Gayl Jones Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When a literary artist belongs to a community that is denied cultural, economic, and political authority, she is often expected to write in the name of that community. All of her work, it is assumed, deals with the common experience of "her race"--and has no other significance. She becomes the spokeswoman of "her people," a substitute voice for the members of her "oppressed" group, who have the same problems as she does. The writing of Gayl Jones has been traditionally received in this way. Like Toni Morrison, Jones is customarily referred to as an "African-American novelist." The significance of Jones's masterwork, Corregidora, however, is not reducible to the race of its author... |
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| Essay on The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen |
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| The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Franzen's novel The Corrections, the author's third novel and winner of the 2001 National Book Award, is a depiction of late 20th-century family life in the fictional midwestern city of St. Jude. Alfred and Enid Lambert struggle with their own aging and illness, particularly Alfred's depression and dementia, and the loss of connection to their three adult children, Gary, Denise, and Chip. The title references "a shortlived drop in stock prices--a correction" (Hill, 32) that is here applied to the American family and the changing face of the American dream as it crosses into a new millennium. The novel, lauded by writers as disparate as David Foster Wallace and Pat Conroy, was treated to... |
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| Essay on The Coquette Hannah by Webster Foster |
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| The Coquette Hannah by Webster Foster Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. This novel has all the characteristics of the seduction tales popular in the 18th and 19th centuries: a virtuous woman, a scheming man, a moment of weakness, a doomed pregnancy, and a last, tearful scene wherein the woman acknowledges her folly before dying. The trials of Eliza Wharton in The Coquette were based on the real-life events of Elizabeth Whitman, a woman from a respectable family, who died in a small country inn days after delivering an illegitimate baby that lived not long past its birth. On July 29, 1788, a newspaper article describing her last days kindly attributed to Whitman superior qualities, no doubt for the sensational reaction her death would create (Davidson, 141)... |
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| Essay on The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron |
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| The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. With his first three novels, William Styron established himself as a distinctly southern novelist. Lie Down in Darkness (1951) is a family saga in the Faulknerian mode, presenting a family burdened by its eroding belief in its history and its destiny and featuring individuals, equally Machiavellian and melodramatic, whose respectable lives belie passionate compulsions and obsessions that often seem intimations of madness. Specifically, the novel reconstructs the life of a young woman whose death and prolonged burial paradoxically emphasize how distinctive and yet how representative a personality she has been. Set at a North Carolina army base, The Long March (1952)... |
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| Essay on The Company of Women by Mary Gordon |
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| The Company of Women by Mary Gordon Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Mary Gordon's The Company of Women is the story of five Catholic women in the early sixties who have met through a series of "working women's" retreats, and their devotion to one priest. Father Cyprian is a former "Paraclete" priest, who cannot accept the reforms brewing in the church, and thus has been relieved of his duties and become a secular priest. Although three of the women have been widowed or abandoned by weak men lost to insanity or alcoholism (one is also a bereaved mother), only Charlotte has a child: Felicitas Maria Taylor, called "the one virgin martyr whose name contained some hope for ordinary human happiness" (3). Felicitas was born with tremendous expectations...
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| Essay on Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller |
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| Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Comfort Woman is the first novel of author Nora Okja Keller, who was born in Korea to a Korean mother and American father and raised in Hawaii. The title of this historical novel refers to the mostly Korean "comfort women" who were forced into prostitution at "recreation camps" for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The women who lived in such camps were raped, beaten, and sometimes tortured; the majority died in the camps and few survived to tell their stories. Comfort Woman presents a fictionalized account of one comfort woman through the story of Akiko, one of the novel's two narrators. Akiko's story alternates with that of her American-born daughter, Beccah. The novel moves between... |
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| Essay on The Color Purple by Alice Walker |
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| The Color Purple by Alice Walker Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the subject of an Oscar-nominated film by Stephen Spielberg two years later, The Color Purple by Alice Walker is often associated with the struggle of black women to gain self-respect and independence. Written in the form of letters, the novel follows the main character, Celie, who experiences physical abuse and sexual violation at the hands of several males in her life and who learns to use female role models to come to terms with the lack of self-esteem that her negative experiences with men in her childhood and adolescence have created. Feeling isolated, ugly, and unloved, Celie's only recourse is to talk to God in the hope that the deity... |
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| Essay on Cogewea, the Half-Blood by Mourning Dove |
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| Cogewea, the Half-Blood by Mourning Dove Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. On its surface, Cogewea, the Half-Blood is a classic western romance. The novel follows its eponymous heroine as she navigates the rough world of a Montana cattle ranch and attempts to do the same in the even rougher world of the traditional love triangle. As one of the best riders at the Horseshoe Brand Ranch, Cogewea (which means "little chipmunk" in Okanogan) wins the admiration of Jim LaGrinder, the ranch foreman and, like Cogewea, the descendant of a biracial marriage. His bid for Cogewea's hand is thwarted, however, by the foppish Alfred Denismore, a white easterner who travels to the ranch in the hope of actualizing his romantic notions of the West. Much to Jim's dismay... |
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| Essay on Cloudsplitter, a Novel by Russell Banks |
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| Cloudsplitter, a Novel by Russell Banks Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. This historical novel about the radical abolitionist John Brown was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for the PEN/Faulkner Award. At the time he was writing the novel, Russell Banks made his home near North Elba, New York, the Adirondack community where Brown was laid to rest. A decade before his execution for attempting to provoke a slave uprising with an attack on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Brown had relocated to the North Elba area. A New York philanthropist had financed the establishment of a farm settlement named Timbuktu where African Americans could politically, socially, and culturally define themselves within their own community. Brown wished to support... |
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| Essay on Clotel; Or the President's Daughter by William Wells Brown |
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| Clotel; Or the President's Daughter by William Wells Brown Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When Clotel of William Wells Brown's Clotel; or The President's Daughter plunges to her death in the Potomac River, she makes a conscious choice; she will have freedom from oppression or she will have death. Some scholars, including Michael Berthold, Suzanne Bost, and Jean Fagan Yellin, have asserted that such an action utilizes mere melodrama to fit with the convention of the popular sentimental literature of the time. Others, including Claudia Tate and Judith R. Berzon, have suggested that the use of the tragic mulatta figure enables white audiences to identify easily with the character. These critics' theories ignore Brown's other possible reasons for using... |
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| Essay on Clay Walls by Kim Ronyoung |
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| Clay Walls by Kim Ronyoung Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Clay Walls narrates the story of a Korean immigrant family from about 1920 to 1946, and their struggle to find their place in the United States. The novel develops chronologically and is divided into three sections, the first two from the point of view of Haesu and her husband, Chun, and the third narrated in first person by their teenage daughter, Faye. This narrative strategy allows Kim to personalize the situation of the early immigrants and to juxtapose different perspectives. The characters express diverse views of racism, poverty, the question of assimilation, longing for the homeland, marriage and family problems, all set against the background of American popular culture... |
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| Essay on The Cider House Rules by John Irving |
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| The Cider House Rules by John Irving Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 20th century at St. Cloud's orphanage in Maine, to his adult life at an orchard, and eventually back to St. Cloud's, where he replaces Dr. Wilbur Larch, whose obstetrical work includes deliveries and abortions. However, Homer's reasons for his return to St. Cloud's, like the issue of abortion itself, are neither clear-cut nor easily reconciled. As Homer, Larch, and other characters try to live by inflexible rules symbolized... |
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| Essay on Christ in Concrete by Pietro Di Donato |
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| Christ in Concrete by Pietro Di Donato Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Geremio is a proud bricklayer, emigrated from Italy and living on New York's Lower East Side. He works on a job with his fellow immigrants and tries to keep them safe as their site boss cuts corners on building materials and safety procedures. The novel opens on Good Friday, and Geremio is anticipating payday. He has just bought his own house for his wife, Annunziata and their seven children, and thinks that life in America epitomizes the dream it promises. On that day, however, Geremio falls victim to a horrific industrial accident, one of the most harrowing in American literature. Because of weakened mortar, the brick wall built by his crew collapses and hurls Geremio into the mortar forms... |
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| Essay on The Chosen by Chaim Potok |
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| The Chosen by Chaim Potok Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 other. It is also a kind of love story, about Danny and Reuven, not another angst-ridden novel about alienation. In The Chosen, set in the Crown Heights and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn, a baseball game between an orthodox team and a Hasidic team brings together Danny Saunders, son of the rebbe, and Reuven Malter, son of a Zionist activist talmudic scholar. Danny, elevating the game to a Holy War, purposely hits Reuven with a ball, sending him to the hospital... |
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| Essay on The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life by Jessie Redmon Fauset |
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| The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life by Jessie Redmon Fauset Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Jessie Redmon Fauset was, for many decades, regarded mainly for her productive encouragement of other black writers--she is still renowned for being one of the "midwives" of the Harlem Renaissance. But for some years now, her four novels have been read with renewed vigor by feminist critics in particular (Fauset's novels all lament the marginalization of women in post-World War I culture) and by critics keen to stress the role that African-American writers have played in the development of the American novel. Fauset's novels also serve as a historical example of a writer asserting the worth of black identity. Unsympathetic characters in her novels... |
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| Essay on The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life by Jessie Redmon Fauset » |
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| Essay on Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie |
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| Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Ann Beattie once said of her characters, "They are suffering. They are suffering" (Rothstein, 2). Chilly Scenes of Winter examines the particular suffering of 27-year-old Charles while he attempts to cope with his mother's mental illness, works at a government job, talks and drinks with his sister Susan and friend Sam, and obsessively remembers a romance with a married ex-coworker named Laura. Beattie maintains a painstakingly focused and detailed gaze at Charles's daily actions and emotions; we find out what he eats, wears, and, most important, thinks. She manages both to ground the novel in realism and to continue in the traditions of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, writers who... |
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| Essay on Child of God by Cormac McCarthy |
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| Child of God by Cormac McCarthy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, McCarthy spent his formative years in Knoxville, Tennessee, the setting for his fiercely exuberant fourth novel, Suttree (1979). Each of his previous novels--The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1974)--follows the twisted fate of tortured souls in the Appalachian hill country. Without the protective filters of parody or satire, Child of God casts an unflinching gaze at a sex-starved, rifle-toting outcast named Lester Ballad, one of the most unpleasant degenerates in literature. All the more astonishing that he is the centerpiece of what, without popular recognition or extensive critical scrutiny, represents a milestone within the... |
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| Essay on The Cheer Leader by Jill McCorkle |
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| The Cheer Leader by Jill McCorkle Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 she was the popular girl in high school. The Cheer Leader is Jo Spencer, a beautiful, brainy girl with a supportive family and loyal friends. However, her coming-of-age in a small town in North Carolina is far from carefree. The Cheer Leader is divided into four sections. The first portion of the novel consists of "snapshots," in which Jo recalls the moments captured in old family photographs. In an informal, almost confessional voice... |
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| Essay on Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth by Susanna Haswell Rowson |
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| Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth by Susanna Haswell Rowson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth was America's first best-seller, with more than 200 editions published from the 18th through the 20th centuries. This sensational tale of a poor girl seduced and abandoned touched thousands of readers in the early republic but can often be difficult for modern readers to appreciate, given its heavily didactic message cloaked in melodramatic scenes that brought so many to tears for more than a century. For a 21st-century public that considers melancholia something to be diagnosed and treated rather than a romantic sentiment to be indulged, as 18th-century readers believed, examining Charlotte Temple's highly emotional language can... |
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| Essay on Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko |
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| Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Native sensibilities of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony that influence overall design, point of view, and character development, challenge the classically accepted definition of novel. Ceremony is a war story, and, like many others of its genre, revolves around the returning shell-shocked World War II soldier. It is also a protest novel about cultural and racial misunderstanding as well as of Native American oppression. In this sense, as emblems of political protest, the characters are narrowly developed, some approaching allegorical representation. These fictional American Indians signify various levels of victimization and alienation. The Anglo characters in the novel, the army doctors... |
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| Essay on Cebu by Peter Bacho |
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| Cebu by Peter Bacho Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Peter Bacho was born in Seattle in 1950, the son of immigrants from Cebu, the Philippines. His first novel, Cebu, won the 1992 American Book Award. Cebu is a quintessentially Filipino-American novel that explores culture clash, family history, identity, and faith. The fast-paced book focuses on the life of Ben Lucero, an American-born Filipino priest from Seattle, his life-changing trip to Cebu after the death of his mother, and the rippling repercussions this visit has on his identity, relationships, spirituality, and vocation upon his return to the United States. Upending the model of the white explorer confronting the "heart of darkness" in the Far East, Bacho portrays a Filipino American returning... |
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| Essay on Catch-22 by Joseph Heller |
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| Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. One of the founding works of antirealist or postmodern fiction, Joseph Heller' Catch-22 realizes an important aim of such writing: It renders a world through its language. Minimally drawn from Heller's own experience as a bombardier in World War II (Heller, stationed in Corsica, flew 60 missions), the novel takes place on the fictional island of Pianosa and dramatizes the experiences of a cadre of soldiers, officers, support staff, and nurses stationed there. Catch-22 initially reads as nearly incomprehensible because Heller's style, characterized by repetitive phrasing, rapid-fire slapstick dialogue, fragmented narrative, and cinematic jumps in time and space, demands studied attention... |
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| Essay on The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger |
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| The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 a distraught preparatory schoolboy contemplating running away during Christmas holidays inappropriate while America's young men were being sent to war, it delayed publication until 1946. The first published story featuring Holden Caulfield was "I'm Crazy" (1945). In it, as well as in "Slight Rebellion off Madison," are scenes that Salinger included in the novel. Before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger published... |
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| Essay on Carrie by Stephen King |
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| Carrie by Stephen King Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Carrie was Stephen King's first blockbuster novel. Constantly in print since its publication in 1974, it remains in the vanguard of the popular works--including more than 20 novels--by the prolific modern-day Edgar Allan Poe. In the introduction to Carrie, King acknowledges that the book is "dated," but also contends accurately that it is still a successful thriller. Still relevant and terrifying, Carrie is a tale of adolescent sexuality, telekinetics, cruelty, and revenge that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. In addition to using eyewitness accounts, sometimes in first person and sometimes in third, King includes newspaper reports, journals, and scientific papers to form the backbone... |
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| Essay on Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. |
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| Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Walter M. Miller, Jr., saw the publication of the first of his Leibowitz short stories in 1955. His story about a brotherhood of monks and their connection to a long-dead scientist amid the ruins of civilization was a landmark in speculative literature, as it offered one the first serious treatments of a post-apocalyptic world. In his story, after long years of hiding from the aftermath of a nuclear war, humanity has reemerged from shelter and is attempting to resume life. Science and scientists provided a target for the rage and pain of the survivors, who need someone to take responsibility for the tragedy. Society's attempt to purge the source of its destruction led to persecution... |
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| Essay on Cane by Jean Toomer |
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| Cane by Jean Toomer Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Comprising three self-contained yet interrelated sections of prose, poetry, and a play, Cane presents scenes of African-American life and features characters that attempt to reconcile opposites of the African-American experience. The book's narrative events seem disconnected, and time flows irregularly. Cane moves in a circular manner, evidenced in part by the half-circles that appear before each section. Toomer's "innovative experiments with time and plot progression," argues Robert B. Jones, "demonstrate an ever-present attempt to collapse self and world, lyrical and narrative--in sum, to introduce poetic strategies into narrative" (43). Cane's fusion of prose, poetry, and drama makes it difficult... |
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| Essay on The "Canary" Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine |
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| The "Canary" Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The "Canary" Murder Case was the second of Philo Vance's 12 interventions into the murder investigations of New York City district attorney John F. X. Markham. Vance is a young aesthete with "a liberal independent income" that enables him to employ a butler (Currie) and an attorney-biographer (S. S. Van Dine), and a European education that has trained him to drop his "g's" ("It is a bit mystifyin'," 64) and to invoke his aunt ("Oh, my aunt! Oh my precious aunt," 198). Markham is Vance's closest friend, and while he does not share Vance's Nietzschean disdain for the herd, Markham is tolerant of his friend's flippancies, and when he encounters an unusually mystifying homicide... |
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| Essay on The Call of the Wild by Jack London |
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| The Call of the Wild by Jack London Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Call of the Wild is a fabulous version of the young adult adventure story (including brave animals, Indians, a contest, etc.), and it is also a sophisticated exploration of the roles of Nature in shaping destiny in a naturalistic, deterministic, and transcendentalist sense. The style in which Jack London wrote The Call of the Wild at first seems stereotypically masculine and precise in an overbearing way, but any grand tone is tempered by a stoic regard of humanity. The novel is enthusiastic throughout, and it is about transformation. The protagonist and only character the reader is allowed any firsthand insight into is the amazing husky, Buck. All other characters flit by... |
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| Essay on Call It Sleep by Henry Roth |
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| Call It Sleep by Henry Roth Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Henry Roth's autobiographical first novel Call It Sleep (1934) has come to be recognized as one of the most poignant and honest depictions of immigrant, specifically Jewish immigrant, life in all of American literature. Its account of living conditions in poor neighborhoods, the pressures of assimilation and the difficulties of working conditions and maintaining employment read at times like a work of ethnography. At the same time the book offers a compelling and often disturbing psychological portrait of the traumas of childhood and the everyday tyrannies of family life. These experiences are heightened by their reflection in the eyes of a young boy, the protagonist David Schearl, who is caught... |
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| Essay on The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk |
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| The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Caine Mutiny is a military novel in the manner of James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor. It offers a formal view of military life from the perspectives of officers who, for the most part, are committed to that life and believe strongly in the values that it embodies as well as those that it protects. Wouk sees little irony in the practical necessity of a strong, authoritarian institution serving the needs of a democratic society. This slant makes for a strong contrast between Wouk's novel and a long line of American novels from Stephen Crane's Red Badge Of Courage and John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers to James Jones's The Thin Red Line, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, and even Joseph Heller's Catch-22... |
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| Essay on Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall |
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| Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Set in Brooklyn during the 1930s and 1940s, Brown Girl, Brownstones is Paule Marshall's first novel. Following the classic structure of a bildungsroman, it recounts the story of Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants, from age 11 to 20. Told mainly from Selina's point of view, the story reveals the frustration and pain of growing up in a violent family. Selina is caught between her hard-working and determined mother, Silla, and her frustrated and passive father, Deighton. The novel opens with the image of the "unbroken line of brownstone houses down the long Brooklyn street" (3), and depicts a predominantly oppressive atmosphere of poverty and lack of possibilities... |
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| Essay on Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney |
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| Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Along with Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York and Bret Easton Ellis's Less than Zero, Jay McInerney's first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, explores and details the frenetic club life and drug scene of mid-1980s New York. Bright Lights, Big City follows the actions of an unnamed young man addressed only as "you" by the narrator, as in the opening lines of the novel: "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning." Whether the effect is taken as an address to the reader understood as the unnamed "you" or if it is a conversational use of self-reflexivity, the novel inaugurated a short-lived vogue of second-person present-tense narration... |
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| Essay on The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder |
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| The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. An immediate national and international best-seller that was also well received by critics, The Bridge of San Luis Rey earned Thornton Wilder his first Pulitzer Prize. (He is still the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama.) That Wilder's second novel has remained in print for more than 75 years attests to its timelessness, as does its selection by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century (Lewis, 4), ranking 37th, which was ahead of such highly regarded novels as The Sun Also Rises, Women in Love, Light in August, The Age of Innocence, Heart of Darkness, Main Street, and Finnegans Wake. Once a standard on high school English... |
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| Essay on Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote |
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| Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote uses satire, wit, and irony, underscored by his inimitable lyric language, to fashion this chic and enigmatic novella. His unnamed first-person narrator, a man with an outsider, retrospective tone, resembles the engineer narrator in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome or Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. He tells the story of Holly Golightly and her mysterious life, and her possible ties to the Mafia. She is an appealingly honest woman who makes her living as an escort and companion to wealthy men, a woman whose grit, independence, and talent win her the admiration of nearly all readers. Because of her unassailable innocence... |
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| Essay on Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska |
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| Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. According to Louise Levitas Henriksen, Yezierska's daughter, Doubleday celebrated the publication of Bread Givers in 1925 with an advance printing of 500 numbered copies of the book to be presented to "important people" and a garden party in honor of the author. The novel would be, as Alice Kessler-Harris contends, the most autobiographical of the six novels Yezierska would write between 1920 and 1932 and remains as compelling today as it was in the mid-1920s. The novel received critical acclaim and remained popular until the onset of the Great Depression, after which it eventually went out of print, until Kessler-Harris rediscovered an old copy in a library and petitioned Henriksen to allow her to bring... |
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| Essay on A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White |
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| A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 "comingout novels" that were a staple of emerging gay literature during the 1970s and '80s. While this genre has come under fire for its often assimilationalist politics (McRuer, 29, 33), White's novel works within the genre's conventions to show the agony inherent in discovering one's identification with a stigmatized lifestyle. Editions printed after 1994 should include that year's introduction by White, which tells the context around writing the novel and also helps to explain some of the artistic...
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| Essay on A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White » |
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| Essay on The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow |
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| The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. E. L. Doctorow's 1971 novel focuses on Daniel Isaacson, the disturbed son of parents executed for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the USSR. While working on his Ph.D. in the late 1960s, Daniel tries to reconcile what he reads, particularly historical studies, with his own experience in an effort to make sense of his past and present. Still troubled by the deaths of his parents, puzzled at his sister Susan's attempted suicide, and confused about his dissertation topic, Daniel begins his narrative as a way of establishing the guilt or innocence of his parents. Drawing on a wealth of research materials, Daniel identifies historical patterns and tendencies, describes different types of corporal... |
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| Essay on The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow » |
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| Essay on A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion |
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| A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. At least four of Didion's five novels have as their central characters wealthy or upper-middle-class women with both significant strengths and profound weaknesses. They are prone to flee rather than fight, and usually make a series of poor choices that lead to insanity or death. In A Book of Common Prayer, Charlotte Douglas, the central character, leaves her second husband, stable attorney Leonard, in San Francisco and flees through the United States with her first husband, irresponsible Warren Bogart. Pregnant with Leonard's child, Charlotte drifts south with Warren, the father of her first child, Marin, a revolutionary fugitive, finally settling alone in the fictitious Central American... |
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| Essay on A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion » |
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| Essay on The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe |
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| The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Tom Wolfe's first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in 1987 to widespread critical and popular acclaim. Only days after its release, the dizzying pace and boundless decadence of 1980s Wall Street so enjoyed by the novel's protagonist, well-born bond trader Sherman McCoy, ground to a halt on Black Monday, the day of the largest one-day decline in recorded stock market history. This was the first of many "resonant" events that led readers to term Bonfire "prophetic." But to Wolfe, the verisimilitude was of little surprise. Although begun in 1981 and serialized in an earlier form in Rolling Stone in 1984 and 1985, Bonfire was decades in the making, crafted with the keen... |
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| Essay on The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe » |
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| Essay on Bone by Fae Myenne Ng |
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| Bone by Fae Myenne Ng Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Fae Myenne Ng's Bone revolves around the tragic suicide of a daughter of a San Francisco Chinatown family, and the personal, cultural, and social questions this event forces the characters to negotiate. Leila Leong, Mah's daughter from her first marriage, narrates the story of her family, which includes her stepfather, Leon, and her half sisters Ona and Nina. The narrative structure is of particular interest: the novel begins at the end, and is recounted by a newly married Leila, who looks back on her family and the Chinatown community where they grew up. The nonlinear process of remembering structures the novel. At the center of the narrative is the suicide of Leila's middle sister, Ona, and the family's... |
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| Essay on Bone by Fae Myenne Ng » |
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| Essay on Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka |
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| Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Upon its publication, Blu's Hanging met with immediate critical acclaim. Critics considered the book "powerful," "brilliant," and "mesmerizing." But when Blu's Hanging was chosen as the Best Book of Asian American fiction of the year by a panel of judges from the Association of Asian American Studies, the decision provoked strong protest from Filipino Americans. The protesters charged that Yamanaka's portrayal of a minor character, "Uncle Paulo," as a sexual predator, was an "insult" to Filipino Americans and reproduced the stereotypes of Filipino-American men, whose sexuality has been perceived and represented as a "threat" to white "racial purity," particularly during the 19th and early... |
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| Essay on Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka » |
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| Essay on Blood Meridian, or the Evening Darkness in the West by Cormac McCarthy |
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| Blood Meridian, or the Evening Darkness in the West by Cormac McCarthy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Blood Meridian is nightmarish, yet so hypnotically written, displaying such a wild and profound command of the language that the critic Harold Bloom, among others, has declared it one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and perhaps the greatest by a living American writer. Critics cite its magnificent language, its uncompromising representation of a crucial period of American history, and its unapologetic, bleak vision of the inevitability of suffering and violence. The novel begins with the kid heading out from his Tennessee home (this also reflects McCarthy's own shift in the setting of his writing from the south of Tennessee to the American... |
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| Essay on Blood Meridian, or the Evening Darkness in the West by Cormac McCarthy » |
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| Essay on The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne |
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| The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Blithedale Romance was the third of Nathaniel Hawthorne's four major American romances, after The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House Of The Seven Gables (1851). Unique among Hawthorne's novels, it is the only one to feature a firstperson narrator, the urbane and sybaritic Miles Coverdale, minor poet and inveterate voyeur. It is also the most autobiographical of Hawthorne's novels, based in part on his experiences at Brook Farm, an experimental utopian commune. Contemporary reaction to the novel was mixed: George Eliot called it "unmistakably the finest production of genius in either hemisphere" in many years, while Emerson called it "that disagreeable story"... |
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| Essay on The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne » |
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| Essay on Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya |
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| Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Second recipient of the Quinto Sol Prize in 1971, this novel opened a new era for Chicano letters. Quinto Sol Publications established an annual prize for Chicano writers to promote their works in mainstream literature and, a year after Tomas Rivera's Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra/And The Earth Did Not Part (1971) was awarded the prize, Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima was acclaimed best novel. Heart of Aztlan and Tortuga complete Anaya's trilogy on growing up Chicano in New Mexico during a time of political and social changes, after World War II. Antonio Marez y Luna, the protagonist of the novel, experiences the arrival of Ultima, a curandera (healer), to his house as the opening of a period of changes... |
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| Essay on Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya » |
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| Essay on Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton |
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| Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Black Oxen simultaneously earned critical acclaim and prompted scorn and shock. Called drama, romance, and science fiction in its 1924 film release from Frank Lloyd Productions, the book went into 14 printings in a single year. The film's popular stars, Corinne Griffin, Thomas S. Guise, and Clara Bow, as well as the controversy (including a condemnation from America's pulpits) that the book generated, and Boni Liveright Publishers' incredibly astute use of publicity, probably aided the book's high sales, but even most critics eventually agreed that parts of the book represented some of Atherton's best work. As critic Charlotte McClure and reviewers have attested, part of Atherton's literary strength... |
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| Essay on Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton » |
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| Essay on Black Boy by Richard Wright |
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| Black Boy by Richard Wright Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Black Boy, the first book-length installment of Richard Wright's novelistic autobiography, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, the second of Wright's works to be so recognized, the other being his enormously popular and important first novel Native Son (1940). In Black Boy, Wright delineates his coming-of-age in the segregated South of the early 20th century. The narrative opens when Wright is about four years old and ends when he leaves the South for Chicago when he is 19. Rather than recount his growth and development in strict chronological terms, Wright fashions his narrative around certain guiding themes that characterized his life in the South, principal among those being fear, hunger... |
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| Essay on Black Boy by Richard Wright » |
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| Essay on The Bird Artist by Howard Norman |
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| The Bird Artist by Howard Norman Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Bird Artist, Howard Norman's second novel, is the story of a man struggling to come to terms with his own identity. The novel's narrator, Fabian Vas, strives to integrate two very disparate parts of his sense of self; he announces these conflicting pieces of himself, as well as several other crucial elements of the novel, in the very first paragraph: "My name is Fabian Vas. I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. You would not have heard of me. Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though: I am a bird artist, and I have more or less made a living at it. Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself" (3). The novel is the story... |
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| Essay on The Bird Artist by Howard Norman » |
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| Essay on The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler |
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| The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Many readers wrongly consider Raymond Chandler's novels to be mere detective stories. The subtle nuances that mimic harsh reality in the plotlines and characterizations, however, help elevate Chandler's work beyond the genre. This gritty realism could, in part, be a result of Chandler's late start in his writing career; he was 45 when he began to publish his work. He produced only one collection of short-stories and seven novels. However, Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, established him as a true master of the American detective story. Initially the plot of The Big Sleep seems simple. An established and wealthy family, the Sternwoods, is being blackmailed and sends for the archetypal... |
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| Essay on The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler » |
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| Essay on Bid Me to Live by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) |
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| Bid Me to Live by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The last of H. D.'s many autobiographical novels, Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) portrays the struggles of a female writer to realize her personal and artistic identity. The entire novel is mediated through the mind of Julia Ashton (H. D.), moving from the breakup of her marriage with Rafe (the British poet Richard Aldington) set in wartime London to a liberating relationship with the young composer Vane or Vanio (Cecil Gray) in the Cornwall countryside. Overlying this general movement is Julia's vexed relationship with Rico Frederick (D. H. Lawrence). The novel is also an important example of World War I fiction from a female point of view, in which Julia experiences the war as... |
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| Essay on Bid Me to Live by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) » |
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| Essay on The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath |
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| The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Bell Jar, like so much of Plath's writing, is loosely based on her own experiences; the novel was, in fact, originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas because Plath feared it might anger or hurt the people in her life on whom she modeled her characters. As with much of her poetic work, though it is based in part on her life, The Bell Jar is a complex social critique moving far beyond the conventions of memoir. In The Bell Jar, Plath uses her own experiences as a way to explore, in part, the tremendous challenges and difficulties faced by smart, ambitious young women in the social culture of America in the 1950s, a culture in which there were few, if any, roles available to women... |
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| Essay on The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath » |
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| Essay on A Bell for Adano by John Hersey |
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| A Bell for Adano by John Hersey Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. A Bell for Adano was John Hersey's first novel, written after publishing two books based upon his experience as a World War II correspondent covering battles in the Pacific for Life and Time magazines. Hersey received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this novel, significantly on V-E Day, celebrating the end of the fighting in Europe on May 8, 1945, with his own celebration for this recognition of his highly readable writing skills. In 1945 the book was turned into a movie that was directed by Henry King. This story about a bell evolved from an article Hersey wrote in July 1943 for Life about the real-life work of the Allied Military Government Occupied Territory (AMGOT) in Licata, Sicily... |
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| Essay on A Bell for Adano by John Hersey » |
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| Essay on Being There by Jerzy Kosinski |
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| Being There by Jerzy Kosinski Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Neither of Kosinski's first two novels prepared his readers for his third, Being There. The Painted Bird (1965) is a fairly lengthy, nightmarish picaresque of a dark-complexioned young boy's survival in the eastern European countryside during World War II. Stylistically, The Painted Bird is a vigorous synthesis of elements of the panoramic realist novel and of the folktale. Steps (1968), a thin novel with very little chronology or other narrative structure, presents incidents in the existential life of a young eastern European exile in the postwar period. Stylistically, Steps is as spare and as restrained as its protagonist is undemonstrative and self-contained. Although the two novels do share... |
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| Essay on Being There by Jerzy Kosinski » |
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| Essay on The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich |
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| The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. "There is a thread beginning with my grandmother Adelaide and traveling through my father and arriving at me. That thread is flight" (335). It is telling that the identity of the Beet Queen is not revealed until the final section of Louise Erdrich's novel. Dot is, in fact, the last of a line of unique women and men and has gathered the qualities of all those who came before her. Dot has many fathers and mothers, and it is through them that she becomes Beet Queen--but on the day of her celebration she decides that her true identity is not that of a beet queen. And since The Beet Queen is more about the journey than the destination, in this context the novel's open ending emphasizes that the process... |
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| Essay on The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich » |
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| Essay on Bee Season by Myla Goldberg |
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| Bee Season by Myla Goldberg Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. With her debut novel about one girl's experience as a spelling bee champion, Myla Goldberg explores the unraveling of a family. Bee Season is the story of the Naumanns, a deeply fractured and emotionally stunted family in which no one is who he or she seems. All of the family members have secret agendas that lead them to embark on their own spiritual quests for fulfillment and order. Nine-year-old Eliza, stuck in a remedial fifth-grade class, knows she is a "student from whom great things should not be expected." No one is more surprised than she when she wins her school spelling bee and advances to the district level. Her father, Saul, a Jewish scholar and cantor with a deep interest in the Kabbalah... |
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| Essay on Bee Season by Myla Goldberg » |
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| Essay on The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver |
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| The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In many ways, Barbara Kingsolver's first novel, The Bean Trees, might be considered a conventional coming-of-age story, wherein a young woman follows the lead of her literary forebear Huckleberry Finn and journeys east to west on the road to independence. Kingsolver's heroine, Taylor Greer, does resemble Huck Finn in her courage, honesty and adaptability. But in one important way, she departs: Taylor is a woman, and that fact defines much of what occurs in this remarkable story. Born Marietta Greer (one can understand the name change, Marietta being entirely too feminine for this sassy character) in Pittman, Kentucky, Taylor early feels an outsider, aware of those who shun her and her mother... |
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| Essay on The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver » |
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| Essay on The Beans Of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute |
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| The Beans Of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine tells the story of a rural working-class community crumbling apart as big industry and corporate incursions leave its people having to survive by making money instead of supporting each other through farming, barter, and shared work. While many working-class novels feature a central character whom the reader is supposed to root for as she or he climbs out and away from the home community, this novel focuses on the community that is left. Their world becomes a smaller, ghostly place as their land is eaten up and turned into suburbs, strip malls, highways, and prisons. Those who had lived modestly and in the traditional ways of rural American culture... |
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| Essay on The Beans Of Egypt, Maine by Carolyn Chute » |
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| Essay on Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison |
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| Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. During a Penguin Online Auditorium conversation with college students in 1999, Dorothy Allison described her novel Bastard Out of Carolina as a "story about a working class family, people who are trying very hard to take loving care of each other and who are failing again and again." Living in rural Greenville, South Carolina, in the 1950s, this family consists of Anney Boatwright; her second husband, Glen Waddell; her two daughters, Ruth Anne and Reese; and a host of beer-drinking, shotgun-toting uncles and aunts who marry young, have many children, and age before their time. Allison's focus in this mix of characters is Ruth Anne, nicknamed Bone, and "certified a Bastard by the State of Carolina"... |
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| Essay on Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison » |
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| Essay on The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff |
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| The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Recognized for his memoir This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff has written one novella, The Barracks Thief, which won the prestigious PEN Faulkner Prize as the most distinguished work of fiction in 1985. A Vietnam story set entirely in the United States, The Barracks Thief is a compelling drama that explores themes of isolation and conformity. Its protagonist is Philip Bishop, a young army recruit who is undergoing his military training. The Barracks Thief is notable for its changes in point of view. It begins with an omniscient narrative in which Philip's father is introduced first. The father is about to leave the family due to an extramarital affair, and Wolff suggests a cause-and-effect... |
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| Essay on The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff » |
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| Essay on The Barbarians Are Coming by David Wong Louie |
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| The Barbarians Are Coming by David Wong Louie Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Following the highly acclaimed short-story collection, Pangs of Love (1991), this debut novel by David Wong Louie represents an in-depth exploration of the theme of cultural assimilation. Critical opinion of The Barbarians Are Coming is generally very positive, praising Louie's wit, humor, sensitivity, and insight. There is also, however, the sense that the superb narrative powers Louie exhibited in his short stories are somewhat strained under the weight of the extended form of the novel. Still, The Barbarians Are Coming is far from another typical story of the East-meets-West type of cultural conflict. Yes, it is that, but it promises much more: as David Wong Louie tells us... |
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| Essay on The Barbarians Are Coming by David Wong Louie » |
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| Essay on Band Of Angels by Robert Penn Warren |
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| Band Of Angels by Robert Penn Warren Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. When Robert Penn Warren published Band of Angels in 1955, the most frequent critical response was to compare the novel with Margaret Mitchell's 1936 blockbuster Gone With The Wind. Such comparisons spoke volumes about the indelibility of Mitchell's single novelistic success, which after two decades was still the pattern for fictional treatments of the Civil War and the Reconstruction South, but they did little to help seriousminded readers understand Warren's novel. To be fair to the reviewers, Warren's protagonist, Amantha Starr, does share superficial qualities with that ubiquitous southern beauty Scarlett O'Hara: both are the pampered daughters of rich plantation owners... |
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| Essay on Band Of Angels by Robert Penn Warren » |
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| Essay on The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers |
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| The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Carson McCullers's short novel, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, brings the uncanny to the fore. Three bizarre main characters populate the dreary southern landscape to advance McCullers's recurrent themes of isolation and loss. The female Amazon figure, Miss Amelia Evans; ex-convict and Miss Amelia's ex-husband, Marvin Macy; and the hunchbacked dwarf Cousin Lymon, come together in a chaotic and grotesque depiction of male domination that, in the end, leaves Miss Amelia "sprawled on the floor, her arms flung outward and motionless" (454). McCullers demonstrates male incursion in the text through the unusual alliance of Marvin Macy and Cousin Lymon--despite Marvin Macy's cruel treatment... |
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| Essay on The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers » |
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| Essay on Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis |
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| Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Published in 1922, Babbitt won praise from contemporary critics for Sinclair Lewis's use of photographic realism, believable American dialogue, and satirical portrayal of smalltown America. The novel relates the experience of businessman George Folansbee Babbitt in the typical Midwestern city of Zenith. Though he has been used to middle-class conventions and believes in the virtues of home life, he suddenly feels tired of his life and takes a vacation with Paul Riesling, who finds it difficult to live as a busy man with a nagging wife. Paul has also been largely interpreted as a sensitive artist figure and, occasionally, as object of Babbitt's unacknowledged homosexual leanings. Babbitt finds... |
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| Essay on Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis » |
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| Essay on The Awakening by Kate Chopin |
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| The Awakening by Kate Chopin Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Critically attacked and dubbed scandalous in its own time, Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) is one of the earliest American novels that openly confronts the subject of female sexual desire. The novel's main character, Edna Pontellier, rejects the traditional roles of wife and mother, which she believes have been forced upon her by society. Instead, she chooses to lead an unconventional life by moving out of her husband's home and engaging in an extramarital affair. Edna's "awakening," then, is of a sexual nature. During the course of the novel she becomes aware of her physical desire for other men and decides to act on her impulses. Edna's impulsive behavior, which prompts her to flout the conventions... |
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| Essay on The Awakening by Kate Chopin » |
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| Essay on The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson |
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| The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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." He had written a novel about a black man passing for white that itself passed as autobiography, but he fully intended it to be outed. Eventually he wrote a real autobiography to set the record straight. Far from being a straight "human document," the novel is intensely parodic. It borrows from the genre of slave narrative, complete with familiar features like an authenticating preface, a cottage where the narrator's... |
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| Essay on The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man by James Weldon Johnson » |
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| Essay on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein |
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| The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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, such as Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway (Rabin, 105). Its status as an American novel has been debated because of presumed categorical mutual exclusivity: novel (fiction) versus autobiography (nonfiction). Additionally the text is set in Paris and its author had not lived in America (or even visited) in the 30 years prior to its publication. And yet the Autobiography made Stein immensely popular among American... |
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| Essay on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein » |
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| Essay on At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott |
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| At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 seen through the eyes of one sister's three children. Twice a week, in every week of the summer (except for the last week of July and the first week of August), Lucy takes her children (who are unnamed, until late in the novel) from their suburban Long Island home back to the family apartment in Brooklyn where the sisters and "Momma" live, mother and daughters in a figurative if not literal sense. The daughters are actually Momma's nieces... |
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| Essay on At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott » |
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| Essay on At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen |
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| At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 Quarrier and their son Billy. The other major characters are introduced as counterpoints to each other: Padre Xantes, the Catholic prefect, and Commandante Guzman represent the local authorities, and Wolfie and Merriwether Lewis Moon represent the many transients who come to the Amazon to dissipate themselves or to disappear. Moon is the novel's protagonist. Part Cheyenne, part Choctaw, and part African-American... |
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| Essay on At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen » |
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| Essay on Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand |
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| Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 Galt's motor, a motor that would have revolutionized the power industry; however, the motor is left in a factory, unfinished. The motor spurs a quest because Dagny cannot fathom leaving such a monumental invention to rust in an empty factory. Through her own struggles to keep Taggart Transcontinental, her business, operating, she discovers what John Galt has already learned: To deprive a person of the products of his mind is theft. During the novel, Dagny strives to safeguard... |
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| Essay on Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand » |
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| Essay on As We Are Now by May Sarton |
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| As We Are Now by May Sarton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 the overarching importance of love. Not surprisingly, many of these themes emerge in her novels, poems, and memoirs. One of her most important novels, As We Are Now (1973), set in a Dickensian nursing home in New Hampshire, touches on all these issues, as well as others important to the writer, such as the comfort provided by animals. The jacket copy of the first edition of As We Are Now calls the book... |
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| Essay on As We Are Now by May Sarton » |
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| Essay on Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis |
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| Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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. A best-seller, like his Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith critiqued a privileged sector of American society: medicine. Because both Main Street and Babbitt had been recommended for the Pulitzer Prize by the Pulitzer Prize Committee and overruled by the trustees of Columbia University, and because he said he did not believe in contests for writers, Lewis turned the prize down, an action that brought him much publicity and increased sales of his novel. As he wrote to Alfred Harcourt... |
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| Essay on Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis » |
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| Essay on Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara |
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| Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra." O'Hara chose the title based on his conviction that Maugham's Samarra legend perfectly communicated the inevitability of his own protagonist's demise (Bruccoli, 99). But while the damned man in Maugham's work attempts to flee Death, O'Hara's main character, Julian English, races recklessly toward it. Julian's perennial overindulgence, selfishness, and immaturity culminates in his own self-destruction three days after... |
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| Essay on The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich |
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| The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 substitutes problems of identity, searches for roots, and attempts to come to terms with one's ancestry. The natives of The Antelope Wife are Christian Indians assimilated to Western culture trying to make sense of their backgrounds by confronting issues of adultery, family, names, war, and the realm of the supernatural. Duplicity, duplicate identities through sets of twins, and multiple visions... |
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| Essay on The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich » |
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| Essay on Annie Kilburn by William Dean Howells |
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| Annie Kilburn by William Dean Howells Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 years after its publication, it stands as one of Howells's strongest fictional stances against social inequities in American capitalism and its treatment of the poor and working classes. In an era of "red" states and "blue" states, an age in which the plight of workers is diminished in favor of corporate interests, Howells's description of the conflict over American identity is also remarkably resonant. The battle today, as in this novel... |
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| Essay on Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid |
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| Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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, having come of age, Annie John strikes out on her own and embarks for England. Yet the novel also shows adolescence as a time of spirited rebellion: like Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Annie John rails against injustice, forging an independent identity in spite of the forces that oppress her (in Annie's case, these are racial, cultural, and patriarchal). The novel's open-ended conclusion leaves unresolved this tension between... |
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| Essay on Angle Of Repose by Wallace Stegner |
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| Angle Of Repose by Wallace Stegner Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 the unrest of the times by weaving together a complicated web of social and political history, geography, and personal experience. His narrator, Lyman Ward, is a retired historian with a degenerative bone disease, which has led to the amputation of his leg. He is separated from his wife and estranged from his son, Rodman. Seeking truths for his own life in his family history, Lyman sorts through letters and documents left by his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward... |
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| Essay on The American Trilogy (American Pastoral, 1997; I Married A Communist, 1998; The Human Stain, 2000) by Philip Roth |
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| The American Trilogy (American Pastoral, 1997; I Married A Communist, 1998; The Human Stain, 2000) by Philip Roth Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. During the last third of the 1990s, something curious occurred in Philip Roth's writing. After an autobiographical tetralogy--The Facts, Deception, Patrimony, and Operation Shylock,--where the author explored the textual relationship between fact and fiction, and Sabbath's Theater, an outrageously offensive masterpiece, a la Portnoy's Complaint, Roth did something few of his readers would have expected. He shifted his narrative gaze from the labyrinthine mirror games of self-reflexivity to the larger American historical landscape. What is more, he did so by bringing back his perennial artist hero... |
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| Essay on The American Trilogy (American Pastoral, 1997; I Married A Communist, 1998; The Human Stain, 2000) by Philip Roth » |
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| Essay on An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser |
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| An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 it is to come into money," when they have, in fact, benefited by exploiting "inferior" individuals. Born poor in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dreiser's youth provided him experience from which to draw his protagonist. In later life, he championed several left-leaning causes, scorning the hypocritical social system and its religious, moralistic explanations. An American Tragedy is almost a carbon copy of the actual... |
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| Essay on American Son by Brian Ascalon Roley |
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| American Son by Brian Ascalon Roley Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 the story of the Sullivan brothers, sons of a long-gone American father and a devoted Filipina mother. The story is narrated by the younger son, Gabe, who is caught between his desire to please his mother, Ika, and the pull of his rebellious older brother, Tomas. Ika finds herself out of her depth in American society and helpless to control her sons' increasingly violent behavior. The novel is about the fluidity of racial affiliation in California, and the insidiousness... |
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| Essay on American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis |
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| American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Bret Easton 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 of sexual violence continues to raise the question of its value, or more precisely, what the exact nature of its value might be. The book is a tour de force, a virtuoso permutation of the premise that serial killing (particularly dismemberment) and commodity fetishism are alike in being forms of repetition compulsion characterized by the addictive accumulation of part-objects that are unconsciously intended to... |
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| Essay on American Pastoral by Philip Roth |
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| American Pastoral by Philip Roth Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 from the end of World War II to the Watergate hearings, the novel focuses on the 1960s, characterizing its turbulence in terms of paradise lost. Like many previous Roth novels, American Pastoral is concerned with the assimilation of American Jews and the transition from urban Jewish enclaves to dispersed and mainstreamed households in suburbia, as well as with daughters' and sons' acceptance or rejection of their fathers... |
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| Essay on An American Dream by Norman Mailer |
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| An American Dream by Norman Mailer Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 congressman and current television celebrity and professor of existential psychology. The text chronicles 32 hours of Rojack's life, concentrating on those hours after he murders his wife--Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly--by strangling her and disposing of her body by tossing her out the window of a 10th floor apartment. Once Rojack disposes of Deborah's body, he then has a series of quests to complete before being absolved of the crime... |
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| Essay on An American Brat by Bapsi Sidhwa |
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| An American Brat by Bapsi Sidhwa Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 American Brat is her only novel set in the United States. The novel is narrated from the point of view of a young Parsee Pakistani girl who belongs to the Junglewalla clan featured in Sidhwa's earlier novel The Crow Eaters (1978). Feroza Ginwalla, the teenage protagonist, is sent by her mother, Zareen, to visit her uncle Manek in the United States. Zareen wishes to dissuade Feroza from following the edicts of the increasingly fundamentalist Islamic society... |
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| Essay on American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates |
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| American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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, Greg Johnson, in his book Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, simplifies Oates's message and overall writing style, not only in American Appetites, but in her writing as a whole: "the phenomenon of contemporary America: its colliding social and economic forces, its philosophical contradictions, its wayward, often violent energies" (Johnson, 8). Oates took the McCullough family, Ian, Glynnis, and daughter, Bianca... |
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| Essay on America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan |
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| America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 causes of his immigration to the United States, and finally the hardships and violence Filipino migrant workers encountered there. The novel is candid in its descriptions and discussion of poverty, violence, and death. However, the narrator contrasts these images with an abiding sense of hope and a belief in the American Dream. The result is a "semi-autobiographical" novel that is strong in its imagery, its commentary... |
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| Essay on The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay by Michael Chabon |
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| The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay by Michael Chabon Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel focuses on Josef (Joe) Kavalier and Sammy Clay (ne 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 War II. Both subject matter and language celebrate the triumph of creativity and human relationships in the face of the evils and Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. Chabon, frequently compared to such writers as John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov, has been praised for his lyrical use of language, his historical accuracy, and his ebullient characters. Like those of Horatio Alger, they overcome anguish... |
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| Essay on All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy |
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| All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 and toiled in relative obscurity. However, Random House's ardent promotion and the book's romantic western qualities helped make All the Pretty Horses a national best-seller. Director Mike Nichols optioned the movie rights (Billy Bob Thornton would eventually direct the disappointing film version) and the novel won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Such success had a snowball effect... |
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| Essay on All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren |
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| All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1947, establishing Warren as a master of fiction as well as poetry. In 1949 Columbia Pictures released a film version of All the King's Men, which garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor for Broderick Crawford's portrayal of Willie Stark, and Best Supporting Actress for Mercedes McCambridge's portrayal of Sadie Burke. As Noel Polk observed in the afterword to his restored edition of All the King's Men in 2001... |
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| Essay on All I Asking For Is My Body by Milton Murayama |
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| All I Asking For Is My Body by Milton Murayama Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 My Body was first published it soon became an underground classic and later won an American Book Award. The first novel in Murayama's planned tetralogy (which also includes Five Years on a Rock, 1994, and Plantation Boy, 1998), All I Asking for Is My Body is narrated by Kiyo Oyama, the youngest son of a working-class Japanese immigrant family. The novel opens with eight-year-old Kiyo living in Pepelau during the early 1930s... |
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| Essay on Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington |
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| Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 the upper-crust Palmer and Lamb families in the novel than he did to the would-be Adamses. Alice Adams first appeared in serial form in the Pictorial Review, a monthly aimed primarily toward women. Alice Adams exemplifies the literary realism movement of the 1920s, where characters' aspirations did not always fulfill the American dream's promise, their circumstances often influencing outcomes. However, characters might... |
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| Essay on The Algerine Captive by Royall Tyler |
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| The Algerine Captive by Royall Tyler Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 literary standpoint, however, his lone novel, The Algerine Captive, is a much more intriguing work. Tyler's apparent intention in writing the book was to warn America's democratic citizens of their dangerous capacity for ignorance and hypocrisy. In pursuing that goal, he produced an intriguing literary hybrid, blending the genres of picaresque satire, captivity narrative, and philosophical novel... |
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| Essay on The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton |
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| The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 York. It considers not only the nature of love and the emotions of its central characters but also the late 19th-century social conditions and rigid conventions that operate so powerfully in their private lives. The 1921 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel starts with May's engagement to the eligible Newland Archer and with Ellen's return to her childhood environment in order to begin divorce proceedings against her European husband, Count Olenska... |
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| Essay on The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain |
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| The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 (1869) and Roughing It (1872); his first novel, The Gilded Age (1873) was written with Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens's Hartford neighbor. Tom Sawyer marks Clemens's first extended creative use of his memories of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri. In the preface to the novel, Clemens wrote, "Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men... |
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| Essay on Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain |
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| Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 chapters of Tom Sawyer, Clemens wrote the first 18 chapters fairly quickly. The writing stalled in 1876: Clemens returned to Huck in 1880 and 1883 before completing the novel in 1884. His work on the novel was energized by his return to the Mississippi Valley during 1883. Though hailed for its humor (at times slapstick, at times biting satire), the book today is often banned in the United States because of its spotlight... |
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| Essay on The Adventures Of Augie March by Saul Bellow |
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| The Adventures Of Augie March by Saul Bellow Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. 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 cafes, then moving to Rome: "The great pleasure of the book was that it came easily. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it. That's why the form is so loose" (Breit, 3). Yet Augie March remains, especially for Bellow scholars, a significant turning point in his fictional techniques. Whereas his earlier novels Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) embrace, in the words of scholar and critic Robert F. Kiernan, "the cerebral style and Europeanized weltschmerz" of a more formal... |
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| Essay on The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler |
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| The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The Accidental Tourist, 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 starring William Hurt as protagonist Macon Leary, Kathleen Turner as his wife, Sarah, and Geena Davis as his lover, Muriel Pritchett. Like the majority of Tyler's work, The Accidental Tourist is a domestic novel set in Baltimore and focusing on family tragedy and conflict. In coping with the violent and random death of their son Ethan, the tensions between Macon Leary and Sarah rise to the surface: she is warm, loving, and emotional... |
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| Research Paper on American Dream in Arthur Miller's Writings |
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| American Dream in Arthur Miller's Writings Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The disintegration of the American Dream after World War II is portrayed by Arthur Miller in A View from the Bridge when families turn on each other to protect themselves. Eddie, like Joe in All My Sons, believes that achieving the American Dream is being successful financial and protecting one's family... |
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| Research Paper on Carrie by Steven King |
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| Carrie by Steven King: The Novel and The Movie Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. The opening scene in the movie is set in a girls' changing-room. The air is hot and humid with the steam from the showers. As the camera moves around the changing-room, we see girls chattering as they get dressed and comb their hair, and we are left with the impression that everything is like it is supposed to be... |
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| Research Paper on The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams: Character Analysis |
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| The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams: Character Analysis Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Although Mr. Wingfield is never on stage and has no dialogue, he is the play's most influential character because he leaves his family in a state of emotional dysfunction. Paradoxically, his main presence is his absence. Mr. Wingfield's abandonment of his family causes the characters of The Glass Menagerie to have difficulty in accepting the harsh reality of their situation, especially its financial insecurity... |
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| Research Paper on Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut |
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| Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. It is difficult to write about war. Most modern literature tends to glorify it. That action is not intended, it simply happens through direct approach to the facts that today's drama requires. In his "Slaughterhouse-Five" Kurt Vonnegut, through a chaotic, indirect approach, shows the other nature of war, the not so glorious one... |
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| Research Paper on Mark Twain Biography |
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| Mark Twain Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. Mark Twain traced his ancestry to Virginia, to Samuel Clemens, who married Pamela Goggin and by her fathered five children. The eldest was John Marshall Clemens, born August 11, 1798. That he was not named Thomas Jefferson Clemens may reveal the political tendencies of Samuel, and explain the subsequent party alliances of his son Mark Twain... |
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| Research Paper on Understanding Edgar Allan Poe |
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| Understanding Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. In order to understand properly the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe -- especially his poetry and tales of horror, detection, and suspense-fantasy -- it is first necessary to understand the precepts of eighteenth-century Gothicism and the generation of Romantic proponents who preceded Poe... |
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