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|  Essay on Anzia Yezierska Biography |
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| Anzia Yezierska Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Anzia Yezierska, novelist and short story writer, known widely as the "sweatshop cinderella," took as her subject New York's early-20th-century immigrant Jewish community. A volatile, forthright, passionate tone characterizes her writing and remains the source of much of her fiction's appeal. She became a celebrity when her well-received first collection of stories, Hungry Hearts (1920), was optioned for the movies by Samuel Goldwyn, as was her first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923). Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New (1925), Yezierska's depiction of the tension between genders and generations, is admired by feminist scholars and social... |
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| Essay on Anzia Yezierska Biography » |
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| Essay on Frank Yerby Biography |
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| Frank Yerby Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The first African-American author to write a best-selling novel, and the first to sell a novel to Hollywood (The Foxes of Harrow [1946]), Frank Yerby died in 1991 with an unsurpassed record of 33 novels, 12 of them best-sellers, with translations into 14 languages and sales exceeding 55 million copies (Pratt, 505). His so-called formulaic novels and "costume" novels resulted in decades of controversy about the depth and extent of his talent. He has, consequently, been excluded from numerous anthologies and courses on African-American literature. Many scholars are now arguing for more recognition for Yerby and, indeed, his reassessment has already begun in scholarly journals; a book... |
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| Essay on Frank Yerby Biography » |
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| Essay on Lois-Ann Yamanaka Biography |
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| Lois-Ann Yamanaka Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the most distinctive of the young Asian-American writers, Lois-Ann Yamanaka has made an enormous impact with her Hawaiian trilogy--Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1996), Blu's Hanging (1997), and Heads by Harry (1999). All these novels focus on adolescent Japanese Americans in a series of coming-of-age tales, usually with females as the leading characters. Thematically, each covers similar territory but with a whole new set of characters and situations. While the teenagers experiment in the usual adolescent manner with drugs, sex, and alcohol, with sometimes disastrous results, the heart-wrenching reality that all these young characters share is absent parents, who have sometimes... |
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| Essay on Lois-Ann Yamanaka Biography » |
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| Essay on Richard Wright Biography |
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| Richard Wright Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Richard Wright, one of the most notable American authors of the 20th century, was one of the first black Americans to have a novel--Native Son (1940)--adapted for the Broadway stage, and the first black American to see his books--both Native Son and Black Boy (1945)--on the mainstream best-seller lists. As Ralph Ellison said, Richard Wright, through his life and his writing, altered the black American tendency "toward self-annihilation and 'going underground' into a will to confront the world," and to confront unabashedly the racism of the United States. Less appreciated in America after his self-exile to Paris during the last 14 years of his life, Wright nonetheless continued to write... |
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| Essay on Richard Wright Biography » |
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| Essay on Herman Wouk Biography |
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| Herman Wouk Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Herman Wouk, novelist and dramatist, has written 12 novels, eight of them best sellers, and four plays, two of them popular and successful. His works, which have sold millions of copies worldwide, have been translated into some 30 languages. Wouk is still best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny (1951), the starkly compelling tale of mutiny aboard a World War II destroyer, and for his novels Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), the latter nominated for an American Book Award. Wouk was also a pioneer in writing about Jewish issues in otherwise mainstream novels. Born in New York City, Herman Wouk (pronounced "Woke") is the son of Russian immigrants Abraham... |
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| Essay on Herman Wouk Biography » |
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| Essay on Constance Fenimore Woolson Biography |
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| Constance Fenimore Woolson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist, and widely published during her lifetime, Constance Fenimore Woolson wrote most of her best work after she immigrated to Italy in 1880. Viewed by her contemporaries as a local colorist, especially about the Great Lakes, she also created bizarre, lonely, even weird characters related to the gothic tradition. She has been the subject of much scholarly study in recent years. In addition to For the Major (1883), a novella, she wrote four novels: Anne (1882), Horace Chase (1894), East Angels (1886), and Jupiter Lights (1889). Woolson, the grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, was born on March 5, 1840, in Claremont, New Hampshire... |
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| Essay on Constance Fenimore Woolson Biography » |
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| Essay on Tobias Wolff Biography |
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| Tobias Wolff Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Tobias Wolff, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novella The Barracks Thief (1984) and finalist for a National Book Award for his novelistic autobiography, This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989), writes in spare, muscular prose reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, one of the many 20th-century writers Wolff admires. On record for his lack of interest in the "self-indulgence" of experimental fiction (Lyons and Oliver, 140), Wolff is renowned for depictions of ordinary middle-class children and adults who frequently find themselves at an ethical crossroads. He uses detail and dialogue in both his fiction and his nonfiction, the latter of which has been praised for its novelistic merits... |
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| Essay on Tobias Wolff Biography » |
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| Essay on Tom Wolfe Biography |
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| Tom Wolfe Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The quintessential counterculture novelist and nonfiction writer of the late 20th century, Tom Wolfe, reminiscent of Mark Twain in his ever-present trademark white suit, has been an icon of pop culture since his emergence on the literary scene in the late 1960s. Like Truman Capote, Wolfe wrote what became known as the New Journalism, a blending of factual information into a short story or novel. His first book of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), a satiric treatment of 1960s pop culture icons, preceded The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), his account of his travels with novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on their psychedelic bus. The Right Stuff (1979)... |
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| Essay on Tom Wolfe Biography » |
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| Essay on Thomas Wolfe Biography |
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| Thomas Wolfe Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Thomas Wolfe is remembered today as a genius who attempted to write all of America into his novels and to create a national epic. Also a short story writer and playwright, Wolfe wrote novels, characterized by a lyric exuberance, that employed myth and sociology, symbol and image. During his brief lifetime, he published the Pulitzer Prize-winning Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935), massive autobiographical novels cut drastically for publication by Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners. When Wolfe realized that Perkins did not fully understand his intent to move from a focus on his character's youth to a focus on American life itself, he switched editors and publishers... |
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| Essay on Thomas Wolfe Biography » |
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| Essay on Owen Wister Biography |
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| Owen Wister Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. When the 100th-anniversary edition of Owen Wister's The Virginian: A Horseman Of The Plains appeared in 2002, critic Michael Rogers called it "a beauty" and summed up the work as follows: "Considered by many to be the best Western novel, Wister's work essentially defined the genre, both in print and on film, and also created the archetypal Western hero: the strong silent type who rides in from the range and saves the day by shooting the bad guys full of holes" (Rogers, 124). Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860, in Germantown (now part of Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, to Owen Jones Wister, a physician, and Sarah Butler Wister, a writer, linguist, pianist, and daughter of renowned actress Fanny... |
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| Essay on Owen Wister Biography » |
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| Essay on Harriet E. Wilson Biography |
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| Harriet E. Wilson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Since the reissuing of 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 (1859), scholars have attempted to place this novel and its author, Harriet E. Adams Wilson, within literary history. Our Nig is the first novel by an African American and is clearly fictionalized autobiography, but it also seems to derive from the sentimental tradition in literature as well as from the genres of black autobiography and the slave narrative. Apparently Wilson not only copyrighted the novel but also paid for its publication in 1859, hoping, as she declares in the preface, to improve the near destitute circumstances... |
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| Essay on Harriet E. Wilson Biography » |
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| Essay on William Carlos Williams Biography |
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| William Carlos Williams Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Best known as one of the great American poets of the modernist period and author of the five-book epic poem Paterson, William Carlos Williams is also admired for five novels, particularly White Mule (1937), In the Money (1940), and The Build-Up (1952). These three novels comprise Williams's Stetcher Trilogy, patterned on the early lives of his wife Flossie Herman and her immigrant family. Williams uses his art to transform their lives into a story about American materialism and its effect on individual members of a family. As both a poet and a novelist, Williams admired the person who questioned the status quo. Particularly during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Williams, a physician... |
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| Essay on William Carlos Williams Biography » |
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| Essay on Tennessee Williams Biography |
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| Tennessee Williams Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. For an enormous number of readers, theatergoers, and critics all over the world, Tennessee Williams was the premier American playwright of the 20th century, known for a long list of now-classic dramas; they include The Glass Menagerie (1945), winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Prize; A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), both of which won a Pulitzer Prize. Fifteen of his works were made into motion pictures, and a number were Broadway successes, including Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1961). But although he was a dramatist first and foremost, publishing more than 60 plays, he was also a talented fiction... |
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| Essay on Tennessee Williams Biography » |
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| Essay on Thornton Wilder Biography |
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| Thornton Wilder Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although primarily known as an award-winning, innovative playwright who celebrated the lives of ordinary individuals, Thornton Wilder was also the author of eight novels. They included the best-sellers Heaven's My Destination (1928); The Ides of March (1948); The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) (which won the Pulitzer Prize); and The Eighth Day (1967) (which won the National Book Award). He was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the most sensitive and erudite observers of American culture. Thornton Wilder was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, to Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor and American Consul to China, and Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder. After attending schools... |
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| Essay on Thornton Wilder Biography » |
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| Essay on Elie Wiesel Biography |
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| Elie Wiesel Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Elie Wiesel was a survivor of the Nazi death camps of World War II and the preeminent chronicler of the horrors that he witnessed and endured. A novelist, playwright, essayist, historian, Wiesel won an impressive number of awards for literature and humanitarianism; in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. All his work is grounded in the Holocaust and its aftermath; his millions of readers are indelibly moved by his descriptions of this part of the Jewish experience, and of the faith in God that sustains a humanity who might otherwise have succumbed to despair. His first and best-known novel, Night (1960; published as La Nuit in 1958), became part of The Night Trilogy, composed of Night, Dawn... |
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| Essay on Elie Wiesel Biography » |
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| Essay on John Edgar Wideman Biography |
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| John Edgar Wideman Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Edgar Wideman, the only American novelist to win two PEN/Faulkner Awards (for Sent For You Yesterday [1984] and Philadelphia Fire [1990]), is, in the opinion of many scholars, one of the most accomplished writers in the United States. Reviewer Laura Miller praises "Wideman's potent, lyrical voice," one that "picks up strands of Shakespeare and Poe, as well as more ancient storytelling traditions" (Miller). He is the author of seven novels and two short story collections, as well as numerous articles and essays. Although Wideman's early novels were influenced by William Faulkner and T. S. Eliot, he has changed his narrative voice in later novels. From 1981 onward... |
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| Essay on John Edgar Wideman Biography » |
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| Essay on Edith Wharton Biography |
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| Edith Wharton Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the most brilliant, versatile, and prolific writers of the 20th century, Edith Wharton wrote more than 40 volumes, including novels, short stories, essays, criticism, poetry, and travel writing. The first woman awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Yale University (1923), Wharton received the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for the novel The Age of Innocence. Wharton took for her subject matter the nature of Americans, both at home and abroad, a topic particularly well suited to her penchant for wit and satire. Since she was an expatriate who lived nearly half her life in France, she was particularly adept at exposing hypocrisy among the socially elite or as evidenced in the cultural values... |
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| Essay on Edith Wharton Biography » |
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| Essay on Nathanael West Biography |
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| Nathanael West Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist and screenplay writer Nathanael West is commonly associated with the years of the Great Depression that he experienced for much of his adult life. In both reality and in his most famous fictional works, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day Of The Locust (1939), West attempted to transcend the poverty, pain, and emptiness of modern life (as he saw it) by helping those in need. He provided rent-free accommodations to such writers as Dashiell Hammett, Lilian Hellman, and S. J. Perelman during the years he managed inexpensive New York City hotels, and in all his novels his characters, often with the help of an artist protagonist, try to overcome despair and disillusionment. While his... |
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| Essay on Nathanael West Biography » |
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| Essay on Dorothy West Biography |
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| Dorothy West Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. When Dorothy West died in 1998 at 91, she was mourned as the last of the living Harlem Renaissance writers. A novelist, short story writer, and editor, West's first literary success was "Typewriter," which tied for second place in the 1926 Opportunity magazine short story contest, along with Zora Neale Hurston's "Spunk." West founded and edited two short-lived but influential literary magazines, Challenge (1934-36) and New Challenge (1937), co-edited with Richard Wright; the magazines included work by Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Ralph Ellison. West published her first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948), to general critical acclaim. Although her work disappeared from literary... |
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| Essay on Dorothy West Biography » |
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| Essay on Eudora Welty Biography |
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| Eudora Welty Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Eudora Welty is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. Mississippi, her native state, is the locus for nearly all her fiction. Although she is inevitably compared with William Faulkner, because they both use myths and symbols, her detached, ironic tone and frequent use of humor and satire, combined with her intensely lyrical style, results in a vision of humanity that is tragicomic rather than tragic. Her themes include the significance of human connectedness, the central place of family, the presence of wanderers, isolates, and grotesques, all of whom remain part of the universal panorama. Each dream, myth, and symbol is notable for the way it evokes a Weltian... |
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| Essay on Eudora Welty Biography » |
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| Essay on Rebecca Wells Biography |
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| Rebecca Wells Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of the best-selling Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996), as well as the acclaimed Little Altars Everywhere (1992), Rebecca Wells writes about her native space, central Louisiana, via a fictional town called Alexandria. She peoples her territory with ordinary individuals who, like the rest of us, often have complicated and deleterious family relationships. The popularity of her novels (Ya-Ya Sisterhood has sold more than 3 million copies, Little Altars more than 1 million) demonstrates the power of "word-of-mouth" publicity: Wells's work achieved "phenomenal success" (a phrase used repeatedly in reviews of her books) without the usual marketing techniques: interviews... |
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| Essay on Rebecca Wells Biography » |
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| Essay on James Welch Biography |
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| James Welch Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. James Welch came to public attention with Winter In The Blood (1974), his first novel, about a part Blackfoot and part Gros Ventre Indian living on a Montana reservation. Following N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968), Winter in the Blood is considered the second major novel in the Native American renaissance of the late 20th century and has become a classic of modern Native American literature. In the book, Yellow Calf, grandfather of the nameless protagonist, helps his troubled and aimless grandson come to terms with his identity. James Welch was born on November 18, 1940, in Browning, Montana, on the Blackfoot Reservation, to James Philip Welch, predominantly Blackfoot, and Rosella... |
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| Essay on James Welch Biography » |
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| Essay on Katharine Weber Biography |
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| Katharine Weber Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Katharine Weber, author of Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (1995), The Music Lesson (1999), and The Little Women (2003), and a well-known book reviewer, is a writer of indisputable merit who was included on the list of Granta's Best American Writers Under 40 after the publication of her debut novel. Katharine Weber was born on November 12, 1955, in New York City, to Sidney Weber, a film producer, and Andrea Warburg Weber, a photographer. At age 16, Weber was recruited for the then brand-new New School college program. She worked in various jobs and married the art historian and writer, Nicholas Fox Weber, in 1976. She attended Yale University for two years in the 1980s... |
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| Essay on Katharine Weber Biography » |
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| Essay on Robert Penn Warren Biography |
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| Robert Penn Warren Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. An American Renaissance man, Robert Penn Warren, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1947) and for poetry (1948), was a member of the Fugitive Group in the 1920s, the first U.S. Poet Laureate (1986), and a distinguished writer of novels, poems, short stories, and literary criticism. With John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks, he was one of the leading New Critics, a group that revolutionized the teaching of literature by emphasizing closer reading of the work itself. Warren was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1970. His critically acclaimed novels include Night Rider (1939), All The King's Men (1946), World Enough And Time (1950), Band Of Angels (1955)... |
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| Essay on Robert Penn Warren Biography » |
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| Essay on Susan Bogert Warner Biography |
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| Susan Bogert Warner Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Susan Bogert Warner wrote The Wide, Wide World (1850), the first American novel to sell more than a million copies; scholar Edward Halsey Foster calls it "one of the greatest publishing successes of all time" (Foster, 35). Indeed, this publishing phenomenon has frequently been compared to both Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. The tale of a motherless girl on her own in the big world captured the imagination of readers both in the United States and abroad and established a blueprint for the female bildungsroman. Warner published more than 30 novels, including several--Wych Hazel (1876), for example, and Say and Seal (1860)--that she coauthored... |
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| Essay on Susan Bogert Warner Biography » |
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| Essay on Margaret Walker Biography |
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| Margaret Walker Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Margaret Walker wrote her much-acclaimed novel Jubilee (1966) as her doctoral dissertation at the University of Iowa. It has captured the attention of readers and critics alike. Many of those critics believe that Jubilee is the first historical black American novel, or in the words of scholar and critic Bernard W. Bell, "the first major neoslave narrative" (Bell, 289). Because Bell considers the novel to be the first important contemporary fictional account of slavery, he places it next to Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Sherley Ann Williams's Dessa Rose, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Octavia Butler's Kindred (Bell, 289) in the canon of African-American literature... |
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| Essay on Margaret Walker Biography » |
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| Essay on Alice Walker Biography |
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| Alice Walker Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the most widely read contemporary American authors, Alice Walker has made a distinct place for herself in American culture and in American literature. Novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, and critic, Walker, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Color Purple (1982), uses her talents to point out injustices against any oppressed individual, with a special focus on black women. As many critics have noted, however, her women characters are rarely powerless; the majority of them transcend victimization to become life-affirming and dignified individuals. In the opening pages of her essay collection, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), she explains... |
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| Essay on Alice Walker Biography » |
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| Essay on Kurt Vonnegut Biography |
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| Kurt Vonnegut Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Kurt Vonnegut is the author of Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969), now considered a classic in the annals of postmodern American fiction. With 14 additional novels, four short fiction collections, and several plays, Vonnegut is widely considered one of the foremost living American writers. Using intriguing blendings of black humor, science fiction, fantasy, the comic strip, recurring characters like Kilgore Trout, a sense of fatalism and Zen-inspired phrases like "So it goes," Vonnegut writes of ordinary individuals caught up in a complicated, greedy, materialistic, and often absurd world. Occasionally, they connect and recognize their shared... |
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| Essay on Kurt Vonnegut Biography » |
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| Essay on Gerald Vizenor Biography |
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| Gerald Vizenor Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Gerald Vizenor is a prolific poet, novelist, short story writer, filmmaker, and teacher. His novel, Griever: An American Monkey King in China, won the 1988 American Book Award, and Vizenor himself won the 2001 Lifetime Literary Achievement Award from the Native Writer's Circle of the Americas at the University of Oklahoma. He is admired not only for his innovative use of Native American culture and history in his novels, his depiction of people of mixed-blood, and his deromanticizing of false images of Native Americans, but for his sense of humor and his refusal to write from the perspective of a victim. Gerald Vizenor was born on October 22, 1934, in Minneapolis, Minnesota... |
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| Essay on Gerald Vizenor Biography » |
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| Essay on Gore Vidal Biography |
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| Gore Vidal Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Increasingly known today as the author of The City and the Pillar, the first American novel to focus on homosexuality, and for the satire Myra Breckinridge (1968), made into a film starring Mae West, Gore Vidal has long been esteemed for his achievements in the historical novel. He wrote about America in Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), and produced the more classical Julian (1964) and Creation (1981). In the 1950s, he also wrote three detective novels under the pseudonym of Edgar Box. With more than 20 novels, several successful stage and screen credits, and dozens of essays, Vidal is a versatile post-World War II writer with... |
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| Essay on Gore Vidal Biography » |
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| Essay on S.S. Van Dine Biography |
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| S.S. Van Dine Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Art critic, newspaper and magazine editor (including Smart Set [1912-14]), fiction writer, creator of the detective Philo Vance, and inventor of "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories," Willard Huntington Wright wrote all but one of his novels under the pseudonym of S. S. Van Dine. Among his most popular novels were The Benson Murder Case (1926) and The Canary Murder Case (1927). Willard Huntington Wright was born in 1888 in Charlottesville, Virginia; although little information is available about his family, they were reportedly well-to-do. Wright was educated at a number of schools, colleges, and universities in the United States and abroad, and graduated from Pomona College at age 16... |
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| Essay on S.S. Van Dine Biography » |
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| Essay on John Updike Biography |
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| John Updike Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Updike is one of America's most prolific fictional chroniclers. Among his numerous awards are a National Book Award in 1964 for The Centaur and a National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 1998. Author of more than 20 novels, nearly 20 volumes of poetry, more than 20 volumes of collected short stories, and 15 books of essays, he is internationally known for his Rabbit series--Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)--a tetralogy that follows high school athletic star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom through four decades of a changing American social and sexual landscape. Rabbit Is Rich was awarded the... |
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| Essay on Royall Tyler Biography |
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| Royall Tyler Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Principally known as a dramatist, Royall Tyler wrote the first successful comedy by a native-born American. The Contrast (published in 1790) was first produced in New York City on April 16, 1787; it features the usual admirable Yankees who contrast sharply with the hypocritical English character. A decade later, Tyler wrote a novel, The Algerine Captive, a satirical picaresque work in two volumes published in 1797. These are his two most significant works, although he also wrote at least six additional plays, one of the first American musical dramas, poetry, travel letters, and a newspaper column, as well as speeches, sermons, and legal tracts. Tyler (initially named William Clark Tyler) was... |
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| Essay on Royall Tyler Biography » |
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| Essay on Anne Tyler Biography |
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| Anne Tyler Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of 15 novels and numerous short stories, Anne Tyler is one of America's most distinguished novelists. After several nominations in the 1980s for major literary awards, Tyler won the 1983 PEN/Faulkner Award for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the 1985 National Book Critics Circle award for The Accidental Tourist, and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons. In the work of Tyler, individuals try to assert themselves and come to terms with their complex involvements with family and community. They frequently try to break free of family tradition and convention. Even when her characters fail to escape and instead return home, they have usually learned lessons that will stand them... |
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| Essay on Anne Tyler Biography » |
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| Essay on Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) Biography |
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| Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Considered the father of modern American fiction by his literary descendants, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is synonymous with two of his most famous books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (1884) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Those novels contain the hallmarks for which Twain continues to be revered: honesty, truth, the use of the plain vernacular of the ordinary American, humor, and above all, a genius for telling a story. Mingled with these obvious talents are his penetrating social criticism, sympathy for the plight of the oppressed, and his powerful ability to evoke the beauty and promise of America... |
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| Essay on Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) Biography » |
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| Essay on Scott Turow Biography |
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| Scott Turow Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Successful attorney and best-selling novelist Scott Turow is famous for legal thrillers. To date, more than 25 million copies of his novels are in print and have been translated into 20 languages (scottturow.com). His biographer, Derek Lundy, notes that "Turow's novels are mediations on the dark side of human behavior" (Lundy, 10); not surprisingly, he is often ranked with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. His first and most successful novel, Presumed Innocent (more than 4 million copies in print), won the 1988 Silver Dagger Award. The key to his success, reviewers and critics suggest, is that he still practices law. Words of praise for Turow's literary skill come from no less... |
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| Essay on Scott Turow Biography » |
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| Essay on Jean Toomer Biography |
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| Jean Toomer Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jean Toomer, poet and experimental novelist, was one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Along with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Arna Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston, Toomer interpreted the black experience in a new way. Author of Cane, published in 1923, and rediscovered in the 1960s and acclaimed as a work of genius, the novel is a montage of vignettes, poetry, stories, and drama. Because it broke new ground, it belongs alongside such works as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time. The mysterious, haunting, imagistic and lyrical quality of his vision has also prompted comparisons of Toomer to William Faulkner, both chroniclers... |
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| Essay on Jean Toomer Biography » |
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| Essay on John Kennedy Toole Biography |
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| John Kennedy Toole Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Kennedy Toole was the posthumous winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980). After his suicide in 1969, his mother, Thelma Toole, vowed to publish her son's manuscript, ignoring rejections and finally asking novelist Walker Percy to read the manuscript. Percy did so and, to his astonishment, he thought the novel original and talented; he recommended it to Louisiana State University Press, who published it in 1980 to rave reviews. A Confederacy of Dunces became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a best-seller, and a film. At once hilarious and sad, it satirizes contemporary middle-class life and achieves much of its humor from its "reverse satire"... |
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| Essay on Joyce Carol Thomas Biography |
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| Joyce Carol Thomas Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Best known for her three interconnected novels Marked by Fire (1982), winner of the American Book Award (now the National Book Award); Bright Shadow (1983), winner of the Coretta Scott King Award; and Water Girl (1986), Joyce Carol Thomas is acclaimed for her poetic, lyrical language. Equally if not more significant, however, is her portrayal of black women characters, depictions that have earned her serious attention and favorable comparisons to Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker. Thomas's novels, widely adopted for classroom use in both high schools and universities, describe the identity quests of young black women and men; they have been classified as YA (young adult)... |
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| Essay on Joyce Carol Thomas Biography » |
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| Essay on Paul Theroux Biography |
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| Paul Theroux Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Paul Theroux, novelist, short story writer, travel writer, and playwright, explores the world of late-20th-century expatriates in a plethora of countries. Continuing in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, also expatriates, Theroux recounts the comedy and tragedy of both the expatriates and of the indigenous people with whom they interact. Indeed, his novels are set in various locales: Africa, Asia, England, and the United States. In his review of Theroux's novel, My Secret History (1989), Gary Krist notes that "Theroux's life involves plenty of interesting sex in exotic foreign climes, [which] ensures that this novel, like everything he writes, entertains... |
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| Essay on Paul Theroux Biography » |
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| Essay on Peter Taylor Biography |
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| Peter Taylor Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although best known for his short fiction, author Peter Taylor received critical acclaim for his novels A Woman of Means (1950), In the Tennessee Country (1994), and the Pulitzer Prize- and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning A Summons to Memphis (1986). Associated with the Southern literary renaissance, Taylor (also a playwright) was concerned with form; he was a meticulous, talented craftsman who wrote tales about family conflict in a changing contemporary South. Although his stories and novels are usually set in Tennessee, and his upper-middle-class characters grapple with the influences of history, ancestry, values, traditions, and the relocation from Southern small towns to cities... |
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| Essay on Peter Taylor Biography » |
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| Essay on Booth Tarkington Biography |
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| Booth Tarkington Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Booth Tarkington, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Magnificent Ambersons in 1919 and for Alice Adams in 1922 (both novels), also distinguished himself for more than 50 years as an essayist and playwright, in addition to his serialized fiction in such mass-circulation periodicals as Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, and Redbook. A large number of Tarkington's writings were adapted for early motion pictures by Thomas Edison as well as Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures. Tarkington wrote about middle-class families and the values familiar to his readers, not just in the Midwest where many of novels take place. He wrote about the value of hard work, the power of ambitious women... |
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| Essay on Booth Tarkington Biography » |
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| Essay on Amy Tan Biography |
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| Amy Tan Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Amy Tan exploded onto the literary scene with her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989). That novel became an instant success with both the critics and the reading public, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for nine months and becoming standard fare in American university literature classes; it was nominated for both Book Critics Circle and Los Angeles Times awards. Tan has become well-known not only for her complex portraits of Chinese and Chinese-American characters but also for her depiction of the relationships between mothers and daughters, especially the generational, cultural, and geographical differences between Chinese-immigrant mothers and American-born daughters... |
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| Essay on Amy Tan Biography » |
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| Essay on Sui Sin Far Biography |
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| Sui Sin Far Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Edith Maude Eaton (also known as Sui Sin Far) and her sister, the novelist Winifred Eaton (also known as Onoto Watanna), are the first Chinese-American writers on the North American continent. The study of all Asian-American fiction begins with them. Although some scholars consider Sui Sin Far to be a Canadian, rather than an American, she spent most of her adult life in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston, with frequent return trips to Montreal, Canada. As scholar Carman C. Curton points out, recent research on Sui Sin Far credits her as "the first American writer, of any race, to present fully rounded portrayals of Chinese people" (Curton 335). Although technically a short story writer... |
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| Essay on Ruth Suckow Biography |
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| Ruth Suckow Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. After decades of critical neglect and dismissal as a regionalist who was overly concerned with women's issues, Ruth Suckow is receiving critical and scholarly attention as both a novelist and short story writer. In her own era she was well known not only for her descriptions of the Midwest but also for her realistic portraits of lonely, isolated characters. She is compared often to Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis. Her fictional women, according to scholar Abigail Ann Hamblen, nearly always sacrifice themselves to husbands, children, and lovers, and have difficulty communicating with men. Most important, according to Hamblen, they relinquish "everything for romantic or sexual love" (Hamblen, 1978, 20)... |
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| Essay on William Styron Biography |
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| William Styron Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. William Styron's place in American literary history is secure: He is the author of the powerful Lie Down in Darkness (1951), winner of the 1952 American Academy of Arts Prix de Rome; Set This House on Fire (1960), (acclaimed more highly in France than in the United States); The Confessions Of Nat Turner (1967), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and Sophie's Choice (1979), recipient of an American Book Award and adapted for the screen in a popular movie starring Meryl Streep. He has also written In the Clap Shack (1973), a play performed by the Yale Repertory Theater in December 1973, as well as a volume of selected short writings and his well-received Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990)... |
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| Essay on William Styron Biography » |
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| Essay on Harriet Beecher Stowe Biography |
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| Harriet Beecher Stowe Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote what some scholars agree was the most important American novel ever written: Uncle Tom's Cabin; Or, Life among the Lowly (1852). Published in protest of the Compromise of 1850 that kept all African Americans at risk, Uncle Tom's Cabin made every reader aware of the evils of slavery, the societal blight that culminated in the Civil War. According to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, Harriet Beecher Stowe was, "the little lady who started this great war." Her second novel, The Minister's Wooing (1859), a courtship tale, was also popular but much less important. Many of Stowe's other novels were rediscovered during the latter decades of the 20th century and... |
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| Essay on Harriet Beecher Stowe Biography » |
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| Essay on Rex Stout Biography |
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| Rex Stout Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Known as the creator of Nero Wolfe, the private investigator often compared to Earle Stanley Gardner's well-known protagonist Perry Mason, Rex Stout was by all accounts a brilliant, witty, and eccentric writer who contributed a thoroughly original character to 20th-century American detective fiction. Nero Wolfe, a man of capacious size and gourmet tastes, was soon joined by detective Archie Goodwin, who assumed the role of the narrator. Stout has been repeatedly praised for his witty dialogue and ability to build a suspenseful tale. Rex Stout was born on December 1, 1886, in Noblesville, Indiana, to John Wallace Stout and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, who shortly afterward moved to a farm in... |
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| Essay on Robert Stone Biography |
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| Robert Stone Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Robert Stone is a novelist whose prizewinning fiction typically features Vietnam veterans, gunrunners, drug pushers, psychotics, and spies in a bleak and evil world. Nonetheless, he holds on to hope for those lost in a universe that nearly always seems hostile. His first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967), won the Faulkner award for Notable First Novel. Dog Soldiers (1974) won the National Book Award. Both novels were made into feature-length movies, with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward starring in WUSA, Stone's adaptation of A Hall of Mirrors, and Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld in Who'll Stop the Rain, the film title for Dog Soldiers. A Flag for Sunrise received an American Academy and Institute... |
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| Essay on Robert Stone Biography » |
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| Essay on Elizabeth Drew Stoddard Biography |
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| Elizabeth Drew Stoddard Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard was praised by her contemporaries, Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Dean Howells, but she failed to achieve popularity in her own day. Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell, who edited the 1984 critical edition of Stoddard's writings, believe that her talent places her on the same level with Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and that her voice is "the most strikingly original" of her day (Buell and Zagarell, xi). This 19th-century novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and journalist insisted on writing realistic prose when most of her contemporaries were capitulating to the public craving for sentimental fiction. Indeed, today's... |
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| Essay on Gertrude Stein Biography |
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| Gertrude Stein Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Gertrude Stein will be forever associated with the phrases "rose is a rose is a rose," the "lost generation" of the 1920s, and her perhaps apocryphal description of California, "There is no there." An American writer in Paris during the early decades of the 20th century, Stein was a novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet essayist, biographer, and librettist. In the last few decades, however, scholars have been seriously reconsidering her highly experimental writing, resulting in a large number of articles and books on this writer. She is now associated with 20th-century modernism and increasingly viewed as a pioneer of postmodernism. Difficult to read because of her unorthodox use of... |
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| Essay on Wallace Stegner Biography |
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| Wallace Stegner Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose, the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird, and three O. Henry Awards for short stories, Wallace Stegner is forever associated with the American West. "It is a peculiarity and a strength of Stegner's vision that in looking east across America, he finds everywhere the same rootlessness he feels in himself," notes critic Verlyn Klikenborg, who also says that Stegner's voice is one of "reassurance, a voice of acceptance, not resignation" (Klinkenborg, 39, 40). During a five-decade-long career, Stegner--novelist, conservationist, historian--established the Stanford University Creative Writing Program, one of the most respected... |
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| Essay on Jean Stafford Biography |
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| Jean Stafford Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Known chiefly for her 1970 Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction in Collected Stories, many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Jean Stafford also earned a reputation as a writer of three first-rate novels. Boston Adventure (1944), The Mountain Lion (1947), and The Catherine Wheel (1952), which focus on class difference, lost love, and alienation. With her focus on the loss of innocence and the high cost of self-realization, the situation for women in Stafford's novels is bleak. Largely neglected for several decades, recent scholarship has reaffirmed both her stylistic ingenuity and her keen, if disturbing, insights into the social and psychological pressures on women... |
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| Essay on Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Biography |
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| Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of novels, short stories, and poetry, Harriet Prescott Spofford--like many other 19th-century women writers--was well known and well regarded in her time, but fell into obscurity until the late 20th century, when feminist scholarship began to examine her work. Spofford was a regularly published writer in Harper's Bazar and a contributor to such monthly magazines as the Atlantic, the Knickerbocker, and Lippincott's. Although today's critics suggest that her talents lay more in the short story than in the novel, she wrote 10 novels and novellas and reached a wide audience. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, she was intrigued with the dark, mysterious... |
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| Essay on Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Biography » |
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| Essay on Art Spiegelman Biography |
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| Art Spiegelman Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although Art Spiegelman is not a novelist in the conventional sense, his work provides an intriguing example of the innovative lengths to which postmodern artists, particularly in a post-World War II and post-Holocaust world, will search for forms appropriate to describe the horrors of the 20th century. Spiegelman wrote a comic book called Maus: A Survivors Tale, My Father Bleeds History (1986) that depicted his parents' arrest by the Nazis and their imprisonment at the concentration camp called Auschwitz. Maus was nominated by the National Book Critics Circle for an award in biography. It could be argued that Art Spiegelman's subject called for an extension of fictional, traditionally... |
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| Essay on Elizabeth Spencer Biography |
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| Elizabeth Spencer Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. During Mississippi-born Elizabeth Spencer's long career, she has produced a remarkably distinguished corpus of long and short fiction. Her early novels, Fire in the Morning (1948) and The Voice at the Back Door (1956), exemplify the haunting but realistically drawn rural South, and the tension between the Old South and the New. Since the publication of The Light in the Piazza (1960), Spencer's fiction contains an increasing number of female protagonists, Southern women who must deal with crises whether at home or abroad. Marilee, published in 1981, is the first example. A decade later, in The Night Travellers (1991), a Vietnam-era novel set in both North Carolina and Canada... |
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| Essay on Lee Smith Biography |
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| Lee Smith Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A novelist and short story writer who writes about the mountains of Appalachia where she was reared, Lee Smith has emerged as a significant force in contemporary American literature. In a recent interview, she stressed the importance of recording regional distinctions "because of the homogenization that is going on in American culture. One place is becoming much like every other place. I am proud of my work in recording these regional distinctions and in creating a record of the values, mores, and manners of the Appalachian South" (Reading Group Guides). In addition, Smith experiments frequently with technique, particularly with point of view. She creates ordinary characters... |
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| Essay on Jane Smiley Biography |
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| Jane Smiley Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. "To live in the quotidian world of Jane Smiley is to exercise will and to make decisions and choices, and to watch their implications play out over time," observes scholar Neil Nakadate. Because she lacks allegiance to "uncertainty" and "indeterminacy," suggests Nakadate, Smiley is distinctly at odds with postmodernism and poststructuralism (Nakadate, 24). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1991 for A Thousand Acres (1991), a novel that focuses on Midwestern families, their problems, and their land. She has been especially praised for her detailed evocations of women, usually stouthearted and strong wives and mothers whose decisions have...
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| Essay on Agnes Smedley Biography |
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| Agnes Smedley Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Noting that the 1973 reissue of Agnes Smedley's brilliant autobiographical novel, Daughter Of Earth, energized renewed interest in the author in the late 20th century, reviewer Deirdre English suggests that Smedley is one of America's most impressive radicals, that rare breed of activist who moved to the heart of the revolutionary struggle without allowing her judgment to get swept away (English). In another view of Smedley, the NOVA online reviewer notes that Smedley's ashes were scattered over the Beijing cemetery for revolutionaries, and characterizes her as a triple agent working for the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, and the Indian nationalists--and "one of... |
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| Essay on Upton Sinclair Biography |
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| Upton Sinclair Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Upton Sinclair, a prolific novelist and playwright of the "muckraking" school of naturalism, remains best known for "having turned the stomach of a nation" (Bloodworth, 9) with his novel The Jungle (1906), an expose of the horrendous working conditions of the contemporary Chicago meat-packing industry. Politically a socialist who would run unsuccessfully in congressional, senatorial, and gubernatorial campaigns between 1906 and 1934, Sinclair devoted his novelistic talent to illuminating the evils of capitalism and its effects on the major components of American life. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize for literature in 1932, and was awarded the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for his novel... |
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| Essay on Leslie Marmon Silko Biography |
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| Leslie Marmon Silko Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the finest writers associated with the Native American literary renaissance. A short story writer and poet whose first novel, Ceremony (1977), is considered a classic of contemporary American literature, Silko uses the novel form to depict the affinity her characters have with the land, with their Pueblo Laguna customs, with the blending of Catholicism and Native rituals, and with the need for healing. Silko incorporates strands of Native American and white culture and values. Leslie Silko was born on March 5, 1948, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Leland (Lee) Marmon and Mary Virginia Lee Leslie, and was reared on Old Laguna, a Pueblo Indian... |
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| Essay on Leslie Marmon Silko Biography » |
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| Essay on Bapsi Sidhwa Biography |
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| Bapsi Sidhwa Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Bapsi Sidhwa, who has been called the most accomplished Pakistani novelist writing in English is less well known in the United States and England than she is in South Asian countries. Her lack of widespread recognition in the United States is probably because American readers and reviewers know little about South Asian history and politics, particularly the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, her central subject. Sidhwa's other major themes include the evils of patriarchy and the survival of the Parsi (Zoroastrian) religious minority, of which she is a member. Her four novels to date include The Crow Eaters (1978), The Bride (1983), Cracking India (1991) [published as The Candy Man... |
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| Essay on Irwin Shaw Biography |
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| Irwin Shaw Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the most popular writers of the post-World War II era, Irwin Shaw came to public attention at age 23 with Bury the Dead (1936), a pacifist drama that became a Broadway hit. His novel The Young Lions (1948) is considered one of the major World War II novels. Only James Jones's From Here to Eternity and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead rival it. His prolific oeuvre includes 12 novels, 14 plays, 13 volumes of short fiction, and three works of nonfiction. He also wrote 13 screenplays. His work, often given short shrift by critics and academics, is currently undergoing a reevaluation; some scholars, including James R. Giles, argue that critics have overlooked Shaw as "a writer... |
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| Essay on Michael Shaara Biography |
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| Michael Shaara Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Before his death at age 59, Michael Shaara wrote science fiction novels and sports literature, but it was The Killer Angels (1974) that won the Pulitzer Prize. It created a new standard for Civil War novels and was the source for the highly successful film Gettysburg. Michael Shaara was born on June 23, 1929, in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Michael Joseph Shaara, Sr., a union organizer, and Alleene Maxwell Shaara. He earned a bachelor's degree from Rutgers University in 1951 and was married to Helen Krumwide from 1950 until 1980. After serving as a paratrooper with the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division (1946-49), a merchant seaman, and a police officer, Shaara published more than 70 short... |
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| Essay on Michael Shaara Biography » |
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| Essay on Jeff Shaara Biography |
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| Jeff Shaara Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jeff Shaara, author of five historical novels, including the best-selling Gods and Generals (1996), did not intend to become a writer like his Pulitzer Prize-winning father, Michael Shaara. As the son remarked to interviewer Patricia Kelly O'Meara, his father led an unhappy life, and, "having seen how he suffered, writing was the last thing I wanted to do" (O'Meara). His father's death changed Jeff Shaara's career direction, however, and he wrote both the prequel and the sequel, The Last Full Measure (1998), to Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. Like his father, Shaara combines historical figures and factual information with his own imagined, fictive interpretations of thoughts... |
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| Essay on Jeff Shaara Biography » |
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| Essay on Mary Lee Settle Biography |
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| Mary Lee Settle Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Mary Lee Settle won the National Book Award for Blood Tie (1977), set on the Turkish island of Caramos, and wrote 15 additional novels; six books of nonfiction; several short stories, essays, reviews; and 10 unpublished plays and film scripts. She also invented the town of Canona (the fictional equivalent of Charleston, West Virginia), but her major achievement remains the five-novel sequence known as the Beulah Quintet: O Beulah Land (1956), Know Nothing (1960), Prisons (1973), The Scapegoat (1980), and The Killing Ground (1982). This 28-year project produced serious historical fiction that traced three families from the 1660s English Civil War to West Virginia in the 1960s... |
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| Essay on Mary Lee Settle Biography » |
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| Essay on Hubert Selby, Jr. Biography |
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| Hubert Selby, Jr. Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Hubert Selby wrote Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), a novel composed of linked stories that include, in graphic detail, a world of pimps, prostitutes, drag queens, rapists, drug dealers and users, and thugs. When the novel appeared, reviewers in the United States, while finding it shocking, also found more to praise than did the critics in England, where it was the subject of an obscenity trial, or Italy, where it was banned. He is frequently compared with James T. Farrell, who wrote about Chicago, and reminds contemporary readers of Richard Price, who writes now about the slums of New Jersey. Reviewers of his work use adjectives like monstrous, grotesque, and horrific, but they also note... |
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| Essay on Catharine Maria Sedgwick Biography |
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| Catharine Maria Sedgwick Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Once considered the equal of James Fenimore Cooper, William Bryant, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Catharine Maria Sedgwick was the author of the best-selling historical romance Hope Leslie; Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827) and five other novels for adults. The success of Hope Leslie, as well as that of Redwood (1824), Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times (1830), and The Linwoods; or, "Sixty Years Since" in America (1835) catapulted Sedgwick to early 19th-century literary stardom. Not until Harriet Beecher Stowe would the United States be home to such a popular author. In fact, she is credited with laying the groundwork for the sentimental tradition... |
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| Essay on Alice Sebold Biography |
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| Alice Sebold Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones (2002), won a Bram Stoker Award for the best first novel, and was nominated for the Horror Writers Association best novel in 2002. Perhaps this is because the novel is narrated by the spirit of a 14-year-old girl who has been raped and murdered and now tells her story from heaven. The New York Times reviewer Katherine Bouton seems more on target: Sebold, she says, "takes the stuff of neighborhood tragedy--the unexplained disappearance of a child, the shattered family alone with its grief--and turns it into literature" (Bouton, 14). In either case, with nearly 3 million hardcover copies and 65 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, The Lovely Bones... |
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| Essay on Alice Sebold Biography » |
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| Essay on May Sarton Biography |
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| May Sarton Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. May Sarton thought of herself primarily as a poet, yet she wrote nearly 50 books, 19 of them novels. (Some were written for younger readers.) She is most well known for the groundbreaking Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), the novel in which Sarton addressed the complex interplay of artistry and lesbianism in an era when homosexuality was largely unnoted and suspect. Her major subjects include solitary women, women's relationships with family and lovers, and the reality and art of aging. Although after the 1930s, when she had been part of the circle that included Virginia Woolf, Julius Huxley, and Conrad Aiken, Sarton's poetry and fiction passed from favor, her autobiographical publications... |
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| Essay on May Sarton Biography » |
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| Essay on William Saroyan Biography |
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| William Saroyan Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. William Saroyan wrote more than 40 books during his lifetime. He won awards for his work in three genres, and gained fame for his novel The Human Comedy (1943) and for a series of autobiographical novels centering on the role of the father. In the middle of the Great Depression, Saroyan wrote with optimism and humor about the American Dream. Despite his acknowledgment of their human weaknesses, Saroyan's belief in ordinary people and in immigrants trying to make a living in unfamiliar and often incomprehensible environments is pronounced. Critics repeatedly use words like charm, simplicity, honesty, clarity, and spontaneity to describe his fiction. When interviewer Garig Basmadjian... |
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| Essay on J. D. Salinger Biography |
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| J. D. Salinger Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Along with some frequently anthologized short stories, J. D. Salinger's fame rests on one novel, The Catcher in the Rye, a tale of adolescent initiation. The novel is a classic in the American canon, conveying the adolescent angst of young Holden Caulfield and his youthful idealism and rebellion against adult hypocrisy and phoniness. Indeed, it has become a commonplace to list Holden Caulfield alongside Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby as exemplars of disaffected boys and men in various eras in American history. Salinger, a master of colloquial language, tells a complex and patterned story that still intrigues readers and critics alike. No one better depicts... |
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| Essay on Joanna Russ Biography |
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| Joanna Russ Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Joanna Russ, literary critic and essayist, is a contemporary, award-winning writer of science fiction. Along with Ursula Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and others, Russ brought a new sort of sexual awareness to this genre in the 1960s. Except for On Strike Against God, a "coming out" novel, she does not write specifically about lesbian issues, yet all her novels and stories are political and feminist, as well as literary in intent and tone. Her best-known novel, The Female Man (1975), has elicited both admiration and anger from critics: Some praise its irony and humor; others criticize its bitter depictions of female violence against men. As Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin... |
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| Essay on Susanna Rowson Biography |
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| Susanna Rowson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist, actress, poet, and educator, Susanna Rowson wrote Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) (later retitled Charlotte Temple), the first best-selling novel in America and the book on which her reputation rests today. The novel tells the story of a young girl whose worldly French teacher coerces her pupil into a relationship with an army officer. Recent scholarship applauds Rowson's skill at using the techniques of sentimentalism in her work while at the same time undermining it. She emphasized that sentimentalism proves dangerous to young women. Indeed, her career, dedicated to teaching girls to become educated and independent, culminated in the establishment of the Young Girl's Academy in Boston... |
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| Essay on Susanna Rowson Biography » |
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| Essay on Philip Roth Biography |
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| Philip Roth Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Philip Roth, along with Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, is part of the triumvirate of writers who introduced Jewish-American literature to the general reading public. Roth, for one, earned his first National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories (1959) and in the subsequent four decades responded to the reality of postwar urban America and to many of his own characters in modes ranging from realism to comedy, and then from surrealism to tragicomedy. He explored then, as he does today, the boundaries between life and fiction and morality and creativity. Because Roth so openly draws on his own history, critical response has been divided between those who see him as self-indulgent... |
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| Essay on Philip Roth Biography » |
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| Essay on Henry Roth Biography |
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| Henry Roth Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Henry Roth is internationally known for one novel: Call It Sleep (1934), largely unknown until its publication in paperback in 1964 but now translated into dozens of languages and considered one of the classics of 20th-century American literature. The novel depicts David Schearl's coming of age in Jewish-immigrant Harlem in New York City, and his efforts amid the bigotry, class conflicts, and assimilation struggles of the early 20th century to find his place within and without this America. Roth is lauded repeatedly for the eloquent lyricism of his prose, which evokes the spirituality and metaphysical levels to which some of his characters aspire. The New York Review of Books critic... |
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| Essay on Henry Roth Biography » |
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| Essay on Judith Rossner Biography |
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| Judith Rossner Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist, short story writer, and poet, Judith Rossner published for nearly four decades. It was her 1975 novel, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, that first brought her national attention and critical acclaim. It was released as a Paramount film in 1977. This chilling tale of 1970s New York City singles bars, although inspired by a West Side murder case, was not written as "new journalism" (Mitgang): Transformed by Rossner into fiction, it captured the imagination of the American reading public because of its portrait of a popular urban ritual and its implications about the shifting roles and attitudes of single women. In subsequent novels, Rossner created plots from real-life cases, as in Emmeline... |
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| Essay on Judith Rossner Biography » |
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| Essay on Brian Ascalon Roley Biography |
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| Brian Ascalon Roley Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Hailed as a new young voice in Asian-American fiction, Brian Ascalon Roley first attracted attention in 2001 with the publication of American Son, a bildungsroman of powerful originality. The novel, set in California as the 21st century begins, follows two brothers, Tomas and his younger brother Gabe, the story's narrator. Together, the brothers represent the Filipino and "Hapa" communities in California, "Hapa" being a term derived from a Hawaiian phrase meaning "Half white/half foreigner." The boys' mother, having immigrated to the United States to escape the caste system in the Philippines, has little better luck in the United States: Divorced from the boys' American father... |
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| Essay on Brian Ascalon Roley Biography » |
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| Essay on Anne Roiphe Biography |
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| Anne Roiphe Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. According to feminist critics (Roberta Rubenstein, for example), Anne Roiphe is a postfeminist writer of fiction and nonfiction, most of which depict women's issues, contemporary Jewish family life, parent-child relations, religion, aging, and identity. Hers is always an original viewpoint, however, for Roiphe is "extremely uninterested, in what is--or is not--politically correct" (Sherman). Roiphe is best known for her novels Up the Sandbox! and Lovingkindness. Anne Roiphe was born on Christmas Day 1935, in New York City, to Eugene Roth, a lawyer, and Blanch Phillips Roth. She earned her bachelor's degree at Sara Lawrence College in 1957, married Jack Richardson in 1958, divorced him... |
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| Essay on Anne Roiphe Biography » |
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| Essay on Marilynne Robinson Biography |
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| Marilynne Robinson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist, short story writer, and essayist, Marilynne Robinson wrote Housekeeping (1981), which has become an American classic. It earned her the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award and nominations for a PEN/Faulkner Award and a Pulitzer Prize. It is the story of an orphaned adolescent but also of self-reliant, eclectic women, told with poetic lyricism and power. Robinson's prose, rich in image and metaphor, highlights the tension between nature and humankind, society and the individual, illusion and reality, dependence and self-sufficiency. The novel continues to defy precise interpretation and to earn praise from new readers. Her long-awaited second novel, Gilead, appeared in 2004... |
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| Essay on Marilynne Robinson Biography » |
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| Essay on Kenneth Roberts Biography |
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| Kenneth Roberts Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Kenneth Roberts published numerous historical novels in the 1920s and 1930s. Critics generally agree that his three most successful novels are Arundel (1930), about General Benedict Arnold's ill-fated march from Maine to take Quebec; its sequel, Rabble in Arms (1933), where Arnold and his troops leave their defeat at Quebec in 1776 to the second Battle of Saratoga in 1777; and Northwest Passage (1937), where Major Robert Rogers commands the colonial soldiers--known as Rogers's Rangers--during the French and Indian War. Other significant novels include Oliver Wiswell (1940), The Lively Lady (1931), and Lydia Bailey (1947). Kenneth Lewis Roberts was born on December 8, 1885, in Kennebunk... |
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| Essay on Kenneth Roberts Biography » |
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| Essay on Elizabeth Madox Roberts Biography |
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| Elizabeth Madox Roberts Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A novelist, poet, and short story writer, Elizabeth Madox Roberts is known primarily for her first novel, The Time of Man (1926), published to critical acclaim in the United States and abroad, and The Great Meadow (1930), a critical success and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In both novels, Roberts portrays pioneer women on mythic journeys to selfhood and uses the modernist techniques of myth, symbol, and allusion, particularly to The Odyssey. A significant member of the Southern Renaissance, Roberts has been compared to Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren. Roberts was born on October 30, 1881, in Perryville, Kentucky, to Simpson Roberts and Mary Brent Roberts. Reared in... |
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| Essay on Elizabeth Madox Roberts Biography » |
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| Essay on Tom Robbins Biography |
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| Tom Robbins Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Eccentric is the word that recurs repeatedly to describe not just Tom Robbins himself but also his fiction. A 1960s cult figure, Robbins--who is largely ignored by mainstream critics--still draws college and high school readers to his popular novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976). They identify with his rejection of state, social, and religious institutions, his adoption of Eastern religions and philosophies, and the characters who transcend establishment restrictions. Robbins, a master of creative plots and characters, an exaggerated use of metaphor, and an absurdist sense of humor, was named by Writer's Digest in 1997 as one of "The 100 Best Writers of the Twentieth Century." Tom Robbins was... |
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| Essay on Tom Robbins Biography » |
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| Essay on Tomas Rivera Biography |
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| Tomas Rivera Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Tomas Rivera, a pioneer in the development of modern Latino literature, burst onto the literary consciousness in 1971 with his novel, . . . Y NO SE LO TRAGO LA TIERRA/ . . . AND THE EARTH DID NOT DEVOUR HIM, which received the first Quinto Sol National Literary Award. The novel describes the traditions and customs of individual Chicanos in the United States, whether migrant farm laborers or urban barrio dwellers. These impoverished working-class characters live on the margins of a more prosperous and privileged Anglo-American society. However, Rivera did not aim for a niche in the annals of American proletarian fiction. Instead, he portrayed the lives of ordinary Mexican Americans, drawn... |
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| Essay on Tomas Rivera Biography » |
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| Essay on Anne Rice Biography |
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| Anne Rice Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire (1976), has been a household name for three decades. The critic Jennifer Smith notes that Rice's concern with "evil and power and the lure of immortality" is a part of her "genius as a novelist: she can combine mainstream moral philosophy and flesh-creeping horror in the same novel and make the reader enjoy both" (Smith). Rice continues to write critically acclaimed novels about vampires, the vampire Lestat in particular, but also novels written under the pseudonyms A. N. Roquelaure and Anne Rampling. Her sympathetic treatment of the vampires as lonely, brooding creatures trapped in an immortal state has captured the imagination of the reading... |
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| Essay on Anne Rice Biography » |
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| Essay on Ishmael Reed Biography |
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| Ishmael Reed Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist, essayist, and poet, Ishmael Reed is also the cofounder of the Before Columbus Foundation that honors talented young writers of color. He is the author of nine novels, many of which are racial-protest novels; indeed, a major precept for Reed is justice for ethnic and multicultural writers who, he says, neither inherit nor write within the Western classical tradition. In his own work, Reed employs a good number of Vodun (Hoodoo or Voodoo) rituals, folklores, and beliefs and creates an African American cowboy, who also appears in his poem, "I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra." He frequently alludes to rhythm and blues music and to black sports icons. As a postmodernist he deconstructs... |
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| Essay on Ishmael Reed Biography » |
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| Essay on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Biography |
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| Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Since the publication of The Yearling (1938), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has been associated with north-central Florida, which she first visited on a 1928 fishing trip. She later purchased a citrus farm in the tiny rural community of Cross Creek. In addition to The Yearling and another Book-of-the-Month Club selection, South Moon Under (1933), she wrote the novels Golden Apples (1935); The Sojourner (1953), and The Secret River (1955); the novella Jacob's Ladder (1931); a number of short stories collected in When the Whippoorwill (1940); and the autobiographical Cross Creek (1942). Other stories and poems were published posthumously. Her literary reputation was secured when she won... |
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| Essay on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Biography » |
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| Essay on Ayn Rand Biography |
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| Ayn Rand Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The late Ayn Rand--novelist, essayist, playwright, and philosopher--has become a cult figure. Although she published only four novels, they all illustrate her philosophy of rational egoism, called "objectivism." After her emigration in 1926 from Russia to the United States, she became an exemplar of Cold War anticommunism; her novels were an expression of her loathing for totalitarianism and her advocacy of capitalism. Her emphasis on the dignity and worth of the individual and her rejection of an all-powerful state still resonate with the large number of readers who continue to buy her books. (It remains a rite of passage for college freshmen to debate her ideas.) As numerous critics... |
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| Essay on Ayn Rand Biography » |
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| Essay on Thomas Pynchon Biography |
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| Thomas Pynchon Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. According to Joel Stein in a Time magazine review, Thomas Pynchon "created epic modernism" (Stein). In Stein's opinion, Pynchon's work goes beyond the "detail-saturated realism" of early modernists to create "Greek-size tales." By 1975 Pynchon had won the Howells Medal from the National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters for the entire body of his work. His three highly experimental postmodern novels at that time included V. (1963), winner of the William Faulkner award; The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), winner of the National Book Award. (Pynchon refused to accept that award.) Renowned for the dexterity and denseness of his prose, his wit... |
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| Essay on Thomas Pynchon Biography » |
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| Essay on Mario Puzo Biography |
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| Mario Puzo Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. "For the average reader, the Italian-American novel arrived with Mario Puzo," says critic Rose Basile Green. Author of the phenomenal best-seller The Godfather (1969), Mario Puzo made publishing history by plugging into the reading public's inexhaustible curiosity about the Mafia. The novel, a chronicle of the lives and fortunes of the fictional Corleones, who emigrated from Sicily to the United States and became one of the most powerful Mafia families in the country, remained on the New York Times best-seller list--and on equivalent lists in England, France, and Germany--for well over a year. Puzo went on to collaborate with Francis Ford Coppola to write the Academy Award-winning... |
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| Essay on Mario Puzo Biography » |
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| Essay on James Purdy Biography |
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| James Purdy Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. James Purdy is the author of more than 40 books, including novels, plays, poetry, and essays. He remains, however, outside the mainstream of contemporary American fiction, and critics have speculated on the reasons for his relative obscurity. Chief among them is his treatment of nontraditional sexuality and perversity, which he feels are ever present in the American psyche. His technique, often experimental, is characterized by irony and complex narrative structure and point of view, combined with a vivid re-creation of his native Midwestern colloquialisms. Although he rejects the term "gay male writer," he has benefited from the upsurge of interest in gay studies and literature and the ensuing... |
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| Essay on James Purdy Biography » |
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| Essay on Annie Proulx Biography |
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| Annie Proulx Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Seldom has an author received so much attention for one novel. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (1993), internationally acclaimed for its powerful evocation of place and for Proulx's mesmerizing blending of tragedy and poignancy, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 2001 the novel was adapted to a feature-length film starring Kevin Spacey. Her other novels include Postcards (1992), winner of the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Accordion Crimes (1996). Annie Proulx was born on August 22, 1935, in Norwich, Connecticut, to George Napolean Proulx and Lois Nelly Gill Proulx, an artist. Reared in New England, Proulx was... |
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| Essay on Annie Proulx Biography » |
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| Essay on Francine Prose Biography |
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| Francine Prose Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. An accomplished novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist who has won four Pushcart Prizes and whose recent young adult novel, After (2003), was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award, Francine Prose is the author of more than a dozen novels, the most recent of which, The Blue Angel (2000), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Francine Prose was born on April 1, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York, to Philip Prose and Jessie Rubin Prose, both physicians. She was educated at Radcliffe College, earning her bachelor's degree in 1968, and at Harvard University, earning her master's degree in 1969. In 1973 she published her first novel, Judah the Pious, a long story in the manner... |
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| Essay on Francine Prose Biography » |
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| Essay on Richard Price Biography |
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| Richard Price Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Often compared with James T. Farrell and Hubert Selby, Jr., his literary godfathers, Richard Price writes frequently about adolescents in city street gangs; as many critics and readers note, Price deals with the seamy, often desperate, street life of the Bronx and his fictional Dempsy, New Jersey. His novels are in the end moral, even, to some critics, didactic. Richard Price was born on October 12, 1949, in New York City. He was educated at Cornell University (B.S., 1971) and Columbia University (M.F.A., 1976). His first novels, The Wanderers (1974) and Bloodbrothers (1976), were written and published before he finished graduate school. As New York Review of Books reviewer Roger Sales notes... |
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| Essay on Richard Price Biography » |
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| Essay on Reynolds Price Biography |
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| Reynolds Price Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Reynolds Price, author of Kate Vaiden, the novel that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of fiction in 1984, is a much-admired writer who has written 15 novels to date, usually set in his native eastern North Carolina. Although comparisons to William Faulkner have become more or less obligatory for Southern authors, in Price's case, the comparison seems apt. Like Faulkner, Price, using a complex, intricate structure and style, creates fictional families (the Mustians and the Mayfields) living in a fictional Southern place, and, like Faulkner's, his characters wrestle with ancestral guilt, family legacies, and determinism; many of them, through the... |
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| Essay on Reynolds Price Biography » |
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| Essay on Susan Power Biography |
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| Susan Power Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although she is often compared to Louise Erdrich, Susan Power has a unique and graceful vision. She won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation award for The Grass Dancer (1994), the story of the South Dakota Sioux from the 1860s to the 1980s. Her characters--old and young, living and dead, male and female--move back and forth through time; as numerous critics have noted, most of her self-reliant and capable characters are women. She has been especially praised for her creation of such memorable, original characters as Pumpkin, the grass dancer; Red Dress and Ghost Horse, the ancestors whose ghosts haunt the contemporary characters; and the magic-practicing Mercury Thunder and her...
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| Essay on Susan Power Biography » |
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| Essay on Dawn Powell Biography |
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| Dawn Powell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Dawn Powell wrote more than 100 stories and 16 novels that were set in either small Ohio towns or in New York City. Her New York novels include A Time To Be Born (1942) and The Locusts Have No King (1948), which one reviewer believes "deserve to be on a short list of the best comic novels in American literature" (Weiner, 23). Although Powell never gained the recognition many of her admirers feel she deserved, all her works were reprinted in a two-volume Library of America edition in the 1990s, placing Powell, in the view of a Library Journal reviewer, "among the gods" (Rogers, 160). Powell excelled at combining humor with observations about the subtle influence of social class. Dawn Powell... |
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| Essay on Dawn Powell Biography » |
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| Essay on Chaim Potok Biography |
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| Chaim Potok Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Chaim Potok, novelist and ordained rabbi, is known particularly for The Chosen (1967), winner of the National Book Award, and for The Gift of Asher Lev, winner of the 1997 Jewish National Book Award. He writes about real and unending tensions between secular and observant Jews, between the modern world and the world of tradition, between a yearning for art or secular higher education and a genuinely pious attachment to Orthodox Judaism, which rejects that training. In Potok's hands, the conflicts between deeply held convictions inform and educate readers, who are often captivated, at the same time, by the author's artistry. Chaim Potok was born Herman Harold Potok on February 17, 1929... |
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| Essay on Charles Portis Biography |
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| Charles Portis Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although Arkansas-born Charles Portis's reputation rests largely on the best-selling True Grit (1968), he wrote several other novels. His first novel was Norwood (1966), followed by The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis: A Novel (1985), and Gringos (1991). Writing in the picaresque tradition associated with his native Southwest and Mexico, Portis has earned praise from critics who see him not as a regionalist but as a writer who has transformed the contemporary western through the use of parody, comedy, and myth. Influenced by the new journalism of Tom Wolfe and others, he creates restless characters who seek self-definition; they also exact revenge for unforgivable wrongs... |
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| Essay on Charles Portis Biography » |
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| Essay on Katherine Anne Porter Biography |
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| Katherine Anne Porter Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Recipient of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize and the 1966 National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, this author is known as one of the premier 20th-century American short story writers. A number of Porter's stories, usually set in Texas or Mexico, about her autobiographical character, Miranda Gay, are actually novellas--notably, Hacienda: A Story of Mexico (1934) and Noon Wine (1937). Along with Pale Horse, Pale Rider, they are considered to be her most skillfully written works. Her only novel, Ship of Fools (1962), although less critically acclaimed than her shorter fictions, was popular with readers. Although her output was slim, each piece of writing... |
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| Essay on Katherine Anne Porter Biography » |
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| Essay on Connie Porter Biography |
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| Connie Porter Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Connie Porter impressed critics and readers alike with her first novel, All-Bright Court (1991), the tale of a black family's life in a rundown tenement in Lackawanna, New York, where Samuel Taylor and his wife Mary Kate have moved from Tupelo, Mississippi, in the early 1960s. Shortly thereafter, Porter contracted with the American Girls series to write Civil War-era books that feature Addy, a nine-year-old slave who escapes to freedom with her family; Porter has said that these children's books constitute a tribute to "all the brave and hardworking women in my family who had gone before me" (Maughan Interview). In 1998, she wrote her second novel for adults, Imani All Mine, about a single mother... |
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| Essay on Connie Porter Biography » |
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| Essay on Edgar Allan Poe Biography |
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| Edgar Allan Poe Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Edgar Allan Poe is forever identified with his eerie poem "The Raven," with his many gothic horror stories, and as the father of the detective story. His perspicacious literary criticism still influences literature in both the United States and Europe. Today's classroom discussions are often about his addictions to drugs and alcohol, his marriage to a 13-year-old cousin, and his still unexplained early death at age 40 (was he drunk? was he rabid?). In addition to Eureka (1848), his novel-length prose poem, he wrote The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (1838). Increasing interest in this novel, from myriad perspectives, attests to its significance in the American literary canon... |
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| Essay on Edgar Allan Poe Biography » |
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| Essay on Sylvia Plath Biography |
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| Sylvia Plath Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Since her 1963 suicide at age 30, Sylvia Plath's already fine reputation has burgeoned. It rests on her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963), the extraordinary poetry in Colossus (1960), and her posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. Her poems are a blend of brilliant, imaginative, sometimes violent metaphor and image combined with passion, anger, a concern with feminism, and a compelling need to be understood. The Bell Jar recounts a young woman's search for identity, her rebellion against convention, mental collapse, and recovery. The novel, taught in many high school and college courses, continues to sell steadily in numerous countries, implying the still... |
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| Essay on Sylvia Plath Biography » |
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| Essay on Jayne Ann Phillips Biography |
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| Jayne Ann Phillips Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. As scholar Dorothy Combs Hill notes, all the works of Jayne Ann Phillips, a daughter of West Virginia, feel universal rather than regional, and "no one has labeled Phillips a Southern writer or a woman writer; her relentless intelligence breaks those boundaries" (Hill, 348). Phillips writes about the uniqueness of each individual, about post-Vietnam war society, closeness and communication, loneliness and the absence of love, and about family relationships, particularly those between mothers and daughters. Her first novel, Machine Dreams (1984), received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and appeared on the New York Times Best Books of 1984 list. Her third... |
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| Essay on Jayne Ann Phillips Biography » |
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| Essay on Ann Petry Biography |
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| Ann Petry Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Ann Petry, novelist and short story writer, occupies a secure place in American literature. Her subject matter includes not only racial oppression and poverty on the streets of Harlem but also the smug hypocrisy of small-town white America immediately after World War II, miscegenation, and the precarious nature of the American dream. Her most famous novel, The Street (1946) sold more than a million copies, earning for Petry both popular and critical esteem. Two additional novels followed: Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1953), as well as the short fiction collection Miss Muriel and Other Stories and several young adult novels. These include portraits of slave women and Harriet Tubman... |
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| Essay on Ann Petry Biography » |
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| Essay on Walker Percy Biography |
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| Walker Percy Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. In addition to essays on contemporary language and literature, Walker Percy wrote six novels during his lifetime, all populated by characters who are consumed by a need to understand their identities and to relate to other human beings. His ability to combine intellectual and existential issues with realistically drawn, witty characters, who understand what they see, distinguished Percy from the beginning of his career. His first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), won the National Book Award because it clearly portrayed one individual's attempt to find meaning in his shallow life. His second novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), was a runner-up for the same award; Love in the Ruins (1971) cemented... |
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| Essay on Walker Percy Biography » |
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| Essay on Nancy Peacock Biography |
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| Nancy Peacock Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Nancy Peacock is the author of Life without Water (1996), which has been praised for its realistic rendering of the hippie era of the 1960s, and Home Across the Road (1999), lauded for its poetically rendered stories of both a black family and a white family from 1855 until 1971. Nancy Peacock was born on June 19, 1954, in Wilmington, Delaware, to Alton Edward Peacock, a chemist, and Margaret Weston Peacock, a social worker. Her parents divorced and Peacock lived with her mother in Alabama and in North Carolina. She worked as a dairy-farm milker and stable mucker before Life Without Water, set in Chatham County, North Carolina, during the turbulent 1960s, was published. Cedar, born in 1969... |
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| Essay on Nancy Peacock Biography » |
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| Essay on Ann Patchett Biography |
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| Ann Patchett Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Ann Patchett is the author of four novels, the third of which, Bel Canto (2001), won the PEN/Faulkner Award and England's Orange Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been praised especially for her realistic and widely divergent characters. In the opinion of writer and reviewer Laurie Parker, Patchett's books seem almost like "oral histories recorded by a kind and forgiving transcriber," as Patchett creates "characters of such varied races and backgrounds, making each one's voice and life so utterly believable" (Miller). Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, California, to Frank Patchett, a police captain, and Jeanne Ray... |
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| Essay on Ann Patchett Biography » |
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| Essay on Sara Paretsky Biography |
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| Sara Paretsky Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the most prominent detective fiction writers to emerge in the late 20th century, Sara Paretsky is the creator of the much admired sleuth V. I. (Victoria Iphigenia) Warshawski. Paretsky (and Warshawski) redefined the traditional private-eye novel as honed by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Unlike the male-created Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, the street-smart loner-orphan Warshawski has an extensive community of friends and supporters, and even shows her emotions on occasion. Moreover, as critic Jane S. Bakerman notes, Warshawski regularly "measures both her professional and personal humanity against her surviving relatives, the memories of her parents, and her constructed... |
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| Essay on Sara Paretsky Biography » |
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| Essay on Chuck Palahniuk Biography |
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| Chuck Palahniuk Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Chuck Palahniuk's experience is that of a man who liberated himself by writing. After graduating from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism, he began a short-lived career as a news reporter in Portland. Discouraged, he quit and became a diesel mechanic at a Freightliner plant. He hated his job. At night, he went out drinking and occasionally got into bar brawls. He broke into open houses with his friends, raiding medicine cabinets for prescription drugs. He lived in the most extreme state of misery and deprivation until a self-help seminar prompted him to write. Palahniuk would frantically jot down words and phrases on notes and scraps of paper at work and at the gym. Later... |
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| Essay on Cynthia Ozick Biography |
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| Cynthia Ozick Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Cynthia Ozick is one of the preeminent writers of "Jewish American" fiction; she prefers, however, to eschew this label, stating in an article in The Forward entitled "What's a Jewish Book?" that too many readers and critics mistake "ethnicity for literature." Ozick believes that Saul Bellow and Philip Roth are the "living Jewish luminaries of American literature," and that they are, first and foremost, great writers whose heritage is "powerfully there." Nonetheless, numerous critics would place Ozick herself among the luminaries she mentions: Her numerous awards include three National Book Critics Circle Award nominations, in 1982, 1983, and 1990; a PEN/Faulkner award... |
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| Essay on Cynthia Ozick Biography » |
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| Essay on Tillie Olsen Biography |
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| Tillie Olsen Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Tillie Olsen is an iconic figure among feminist writers and thinkers of the late 20th century; she has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and honorary degrees. More important, Tell Me a Riddle (1961) is required reading in many American literature and women's literature classes, and has been anthologized more than 100 times, and Olsen's rediscovered novel Yonnondio: from the Thirties (1974) is thought by many important critics to be the best novel published about the 1930s. For her writing, she received the 1975 American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature, and for her political activism and concern for the underprivileged, in 1981 the city of San Francisco...
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| Essay on Tillie Olsen Biography » |
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| Essay on John Okada Biography |
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| John Okada Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of the forgotten, resurrected, and now classic No-No Boy (1957), John Okada wrote about the much maligned and regrettable relocation centers that the United States government forced Japanese Americans into during World War II, after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. Part of the reason that his manuscript was repeatedly rejected by publishers before its eventual success is related to this unfair treatment of American citizens of Japanese descent. After publication, the novel sold poorly, rejected even by the Japanese-American community, which felt shamed by the book (Chen). It disappeared from sight for two decades until Frank Chin and other Asian-American writers rediscovered it and arranged... |
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| Essay on John Okada Biography » |
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| Essay on John O'Hara Biography |
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| John O'Hara Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the most prolific and financially successful writers of the 20th century, John O'Hara won the 1956 National Book Award for Ten North Frederick and the 1952 New York Drama Critics' Circle and Donaldson awards (both for the musical Pal Joey) and wrote 18 novels. Indelibly associated with the New Yorker, he wrote 374 short stories for that magazine. His fiction was always grounded in realism and naturalism, and he had an infallible ear for believable American dialogue. His work typically included characters who collided with an essentially predetermined future; he treated class prejudices and sexual issues with frankness. As scholar Sheldon Norman Grebstein noted, despite... |
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| Essay on John O'Hara Biography » |
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| Essay on Flannery O'Connor Biography |
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| Flannery O'Connor Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The critical esteem regarding Flannery O'Connor shows no signs of diminishing. In her stories, always set in the South, her rural middle-class characters confront darkness, violence, and evil; her fiction has variously been labeled ironic, Southern grotesque or gothic, black humor, or sardonic, tinged with elements of O'Connor's Roman Catholic faith. Her work contains a distinctly original and brilliant blend of comedy and moral seriousness. Although best known for her short stories, O'Connor also wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), both of which appear often on class syllabi in college courses. Since O'Connor's death in 1964, scholarly... |
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| Essay on Flannery O'Connor Biography » |
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| Essay on Edwin O'Connor Biography |
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| Edwin O'Connor Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Edwin O'Connor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and radio broadcaster, is remembered today chiefly for two of the six novels he wrote during his relatively brief lifetime: The Last Hurrah (1956), a novel about an Irish-American Boston political boss, contributed its title phrase to the American lexicon and became a classic American film directed by John Ford; and The Edge of Sadness, winner of the 1962 Pulitzer Prize, chronicled three generations of an Irish-American family and is the first American "priest novel" (Rank, 191). Both books were highly praised and helped form O'Connor's reputation as a spokesman for Irish-American people and as a chronicler of Boston life, but for most... |
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| Essay on Edwin O'Connor Biography » |
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| Essay on Tim O'Brien Biography |
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| Tim O'Brien Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Tim O'Brien once said that he would be proud to have written the relatively small but excellent body of fiction by Tillie Olsen. Like Olsen, his own oeuvre has maintained the same high quality that characterized his second novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), winner of the National Book Award and widely considered the finest literary work about the Vietnam War. O'Brien has continued to mine his combat experiences in Vietnam, honing his craft and combining a spare prose style with an eloquent quality and a penchant for humor and dreamlike symbolism. Although the Vietnam War still appears in his fiction, many critics believe that his imaginative powers and originality make him more... |
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| Essay on Tim O'Brien Biography » |
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| Essay on Joyce Carol Oates Biography |
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| Joyce Carol Oates Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most talented and prolific American writers of our era, belongs to a long tradition of serious literary novelists who also have broad popular appeal. These include her American predecessors Edith Wharton and Henry James, and their British counterparts George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Fanny Burney. Her more than 40 novels appear on both best-seller lists and university syllabi, and impressive numbers of them have been nominees or winners of he National Book Award: A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), Them (1969), and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1989). Black Water (1993) was a National Book Critics Circle... |
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| Essay on Joyce Carol Oates Biography » |
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| Essay on Frank Norris Biography |
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| Frank Norris Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Frank Norris, one of the most influential practitioners of American naturalism, became "the touchstone for turn-of-the-century changes in art and thought" (McElrath, ix). His work not only depicts his era but also, in sometimes graphic, sometimes brutal detail, reflects the cultural changes taking place as one century ended and another began. Influenced by the French naturalism of Emile Zola, Norris, along with Stephen Crane and Hamlin Garland, wrote about the problems of the poor and the down-and-out, although literature about the genteel life was in fashion. He is remembered today for his novels McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California (1901)... |
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| Essay on Frank Norris Biography » |
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| Essay on Anais Nin Biography |
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| Anais Nin Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Anais Nin was an experimental expatriate writer who wrote subjective, imaginative novels and a series of diaries (covering the years 1914 to 1974), often about taboo sexual issues, including an incestuous relationship with her father. The work that Nin called her "continuous novel," Cities of the Interior (1974), comprised five novels, held together by three women characters. These novels appeared separately between 1946 and 1961: Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1950), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). Nin also wrote five collections of short stories; like the novels, they were characterized by a dreamlike... |
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| Essay on Anais Nin Biography » |
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| Essay on Gloria Naylor Biography |
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| Gloria Naylor Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although Gloria Naylor usually examines the lives of contemporary African Americans, in her five novels to date, she has also taken care to address how African-American history is central to her fiction. Naylor is acutely aware of how the past enslavement of her ancestors and a legacy of oppression, separated families, and motherless children resonates today. Her women characters, however, gain strength through motherhood, nurturing, community, and the black matriarchal tradition. She understands their predicaments, as well, and does not flinch from exposing the contributions of white greed and hypocrisy. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), winner of an American Book Award... |
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| Essay on Gloria Naylor Biography » |
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| Essay on Vladimir Nabokov Biography |
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| Vladimir Nabokov Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Vladimir Nabokov is universally revered for his contributions to the literature of the United States and Russia. A trilingual novelist, scholar, literary critic, translator, poet, essay writer, and lepidopterist, he helped bring European modernism to the United States. His enormous body of work includes nearly a score of novels, eight of which were written in English, the most famous being Lolita, published in Paris in 1955 and in New York in 1958. Also much admired are Pale Fire (1962) and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). A writer of enormous complexity, Nabokov delighted in playing word games--through puns, acrostics, anagrams, and the like--with the reader and in this respect... |
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| Essay on Vladimir Nabokov Biography » |
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| Essay on Milton Murayama Biography |
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| Milton Murayama Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Milton Murayama, the author of a planned tetralogy that examines the Japanese-American experience in Hawaii, has thus far published three of his projected four novels depicting the Oyama clan, a plantation family struggling with the often irreconcilable cultural clashes between ancestral Japanese traditions and the sometimes radically different Hawaiian and American customs. The first, All I Asking for Is My Body (1988), addresses issues of ethnicity and class on the plantation where the Oyama family lives and works. Although the novel faced the usual difficulties in finding a publisher, it triumphed by winning the 1980 American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. It was followed by... |
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| Essay on Milton Murayama Biography » |
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| Essay on Mourning Dove Biography |
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| Mourning Dove Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Mourning Dove, the English translation of the Salishan word Humishima, is the pen name of Christine Quintasket, the author of the novel Cogewea, The Half-Blood: A Depiction Of The Great Montana Cattle Range (1927) and one of the earliest Native-American women to write a novel. As the scholar Beverly G. Six notes, however, despite the recent finding of Alice Callahan's earlier Wynema (1891), Mourning Dove was "the first Native American woman to publish a novel that conveyed Native history, cultural practices, and religion through the blending of fictional narrative and folktales" (Six, 253). Mourning Dove also wrote a collection of tales entitled Coyote Stories (1931), Tales of the Okanogans (1976), and... |
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| Essay on Mourning Dove Biography » |
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| Essay on Walter Mosley Biography |
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| Walter Mosley Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the most popular and critically well regarded among contemporary detective novelists, Walter Mosley created Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, sometimes described as the African-American Philip Marlowe. Just as Marlowe's creator, Raymond Chandler, wrote of the "mean streets" of Los Angeles, Mosley "reconstructs Los Angeles during the post-World War II era," says the critic Sara M. Lomax, but "from an African-American perspective" (Lomax, 32). Mosley's talents far exceed those of a black Raymond Chandler, however. As the scholar Stephen Soitos points out, Mosley and other black detective fiction writers use this genre in unique ways to comment on the lives of contemporary African Americans... |
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| Essay on Walter Mosley Biography » |
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| Essay on Christopher Morley Biography |
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| Christopher Morley Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Among the most popular and prolific authors of his day, Christopher Morley was a novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, and founder of the Saturday Review of Literature. He wrote about the relationship of literature to the lives of ordinary people, and many of his novels feature people in the world of words: Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and its sequel, The Haunted Bookshop (1919) (traveling booksellers and bookshop owners); Human Being (1932) (publisher and book salesman); and The Man Who Made Friends With Himself (literary agent). He was also an ardent proponent of other writers, especially the Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad. Morley's most popular novel was Kitty Foyle, a 1939 bestseller... |
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| Essay on Christopher Morley Biography » |
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| Essay on Lorrie Moore Biography |
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| Lorrie Moore Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Award-winning short story writer Lorrie Moore has written two acclaimed novels as well, Anagrams (1986) and Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? (1994). She is admired for her sardonic wit, wry sense of humor, and well-phrased one-liners, yet the overall mood of her work (particularly the endings) is somber and dark: Her characters realize that few of their youthful aspirations and dreams will be fulfilled. Lorrie Moore was born on January 13, 1957, in Glens Falls, New York, to Henry T. Moore, an insurance company executive, and Jeanne Day Moore, a nurse. She was educated at St. Lawrence University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1978, and Cornell University, where she studied with the novelist... |
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| Essay on Lorrie Moore Biography » |
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| Essay on Rick Moody Biography |
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| Rick Moody Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Often compared with John Hawkes and Don DeLillo, and with John Cheever and John Updike, all of whom write in various ways about the upper-middle class, Rick Moody has won critical acclaim as a novelist and short story writer. He is praised for his experiments with language and form, and uses pop culture images to present a bleak but comic view of the emptiness of modern life. As Susan Salter Reynolds says, Moody "has become, for a generation of people in their 30s and 40s, a dark chronicler of American suburbia--mostly [of] the East Coast variety" (Reynolds, E1). Rick Moody was born on October 18, 1961, in New Canaan, Connecticut, to Hiram F. Moody Jr. and Margaret Maureen Flynn. He was educated at... |
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| Essay on Rick Moody Biography » |
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| Essay on N. Scott Momaday Biography |
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| N. Scott Momaday Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday, a member of the Kiowa tribe, is often credited with creating reader interest in Native-American literature. He is also the author of The Way to Rainy Mountain, an experimental postmodernist work that blends several genres, and The Ancient Child (1989), an autobiographical novel. Central to all Momaday's work is the land, his Kiowa ancestors, and the significance of folklore and legend in anchoring Native Americans to their past. N. Scott Momaday was born on February 27, 1934, in Lawton, Oklahoma, to Alfred Morris, a Kiowa artist and art teacher, and Mayme Natachee Scott Momaday, a teacher and writer with white and... |
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| Essay on N. Scott Momaday Biography » |
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| Essay on Nicholasa Mohr Biography |
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| Nicholasa Mohr Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A Puerto Rican American from New York (or Nuyorican), Nicholasa Mohr has set most of her novels and short stories in the Bronx or on the Lower East Side (Losaida) of Manhattan. Her protagonists are mainly Puerto Rican immigrant girls and women. Although some of her work is written for young adults, she also writes for adults, treating such themes as homosexuality, murder, drug use, prostitution--and art. Mohr's depictions of both characters and their speech are sometimes earthy; she uses slang, street language, and Puerto Rican Spanish, folding it into the English used by her characters. Her characters are nearly always strong survivors who manage to draw on reserves of self-esteem and resiliency... |
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| Essay on Nicholasa Mohr Biography » |
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| Essay on Margaret Mitchell Biography |
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| Margaret Mitchell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Margaret Mitchell wrote only Gone with the Wind (1936), but it became one of the best-selling novels in American history and secured her literary legacy. Gone with the Wind, set in Georgia during the Confederacy and Reconstruction eras, reflects the point of view of Scarlett O'Hara, its strong-willed, rebellious central character. Although the novel seems at first glance to belong to the plantation novel genre--characterized by nostalgia, romance, and an attitude toward blacks that seems racist by contemporary standards--scholars in the last three decades have interpreted it differently. Many see through the "moonlight and magnolia" facade of the novel to the ironic, complex, and subtle... |
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| Essay on Margaret Mitchell Biography » |
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| Essay on Susan Minot Biography |
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| Susan Minot Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Besides Monkeys, Minot's first novel and winner of the 1988 Prix Femina, Susan Minot has written three additional novels, Folly (1992), Evening (1999), and Rapture (2002), along with Lust and Other Stories (1989), a screenplay, Stealing Beauty (1996), and award-winning stories, as yet uncollected, published in Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Paris Review. Minot, a minimalist, has earned comparisons to J. D. Salinger. Her use of realism and sensory detail underscores her revelation of inner psychological truths. Minot is particularly adept at revealing the feminist perspective of her often-disappointed women characters. According to the interviewer Marcie Thiebaux, Minot reads Henry James, James Fenimore... |
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| Essay on Susan Minot Biography » |
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| Essay on Steven Millhauser Biography |
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| Steven Millhauser Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The novels of Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser evoke the sweetness and pain of childhood and youth, although some of his witty, satiric recent work focuses on adulthood and the issues of love and betrayal. His work has been called magical, enchanting, and dreamlike, because many of his novels cross the boundary between the real and the unreal, or the actual and the illusory. Steven Millhauser was born on August 3, 1943, in New York City. He graduated with a B.A. from Columbia University (1965), pursued graduate studies at Brown University for several years, and won the 1975 Prix Medicis Etranger for his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954... |
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| Essay on Steven Millhauser Biography » |
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| Essay on Walter Miller Biography |
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| Walter Miller Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Much of Walter Miller's life seemed swathed in mystery. Recipient of two Hugo Awards--in 1955 for the novella The Darfstellar and in 1961 for the novel A Canticle For Leibowitz--this writer was as private and reclusive as J. D. Salinger. Walter M. Miller was born on January 23, 1923, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, to Walter Michael and Ruth Adrian Jones Miller. He studied at the University of Tennessee (1940-42) and at the University of Texas (1947-49); from 1942 to 1945 he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, flying 53 missions and earning an Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters. He married Anna Louise Becker in 1945 and, after a serious auto accident during his senior year at the University of Texas... |
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| Essay on Walter Miller Biography » |
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| Essay on Sue Miller Biography |
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| Sue Miller Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. "It seems we need someone to know us as we are--with all we have done--and forgive us," says the author Sue Miller in an interview with Ron Fletcher. "We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please" (Fletcher). These ideas surface in Miller's controversial first novel, The Good Mother (1986), where it is clear that happiness for women requires more than a no-cost divorce. A talented stylist, Miller has been praised for her persuasive and divergent uses of perspective along with her thoughtful depiction of romance, marriage, and family. Through the use of realistic details and complex psychological characterization, she considers the changing impact of gender... |
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| Essay on Sue Miller Biography » |
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| Essay on Henry Miller Biography |
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| Henry Miller Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Henry Miller, famously associated with his expatriate Paris novels Tropic Of Cancer (1934) and Tropic Of Capricorn (1939), as well as the sketches and stories in Black Spring (1936), wrote highly autobiographical works attacking repression and technology, replete with obscene language and graphic sexual encounters. In addition to explicit depictions of sex, critics have singled out his rambling style. However, says the scholar Kingsley Widmer, "From the opening epigraph of Tropic of Cancer . . . through a nearly half-century literary career, Miller's obsessive subject is himself" (Widmer, 1). His subject matter, including street sex and prostitution, caused his books to be banned in the United States... |
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| Essay on Henry Miller Biography » |
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| Essay on James Michener Biography |
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| James Michener Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the most popular writers of the last half of the 20th century, James Michener emerged on the American literary scene at age 40 with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific (1947), a collection of short stories that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted into the enormously successful Broadway musical South Pacific. It was later also made into a popular film. The author of 23 novels, Michener also published five volumes of short fiction and miscellany, and 26 volumes of nonfiction. His abiding appeal to readers, rooted in a technique that he used to great advantage, was to blend fact and story in the setting of a particular place. Michener used an enormous mass of detail... |
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| Essay on James Michener Biography » |
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| Essay on Grace Metalious Biography |
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| Grace Metalious Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Grace Metalious's name is immortalized through her post-World War II soap opera novel, Peyton Place (1956). The tale of a small gossipy New England town and its scandals, the novel was bought in enormous numbers by the reading public but scorned by critics. It sold more than 300,000 hardcover copies to readers apparently intrigued by the dark side of a New England ordinarily idealized by such artists as Norman Rockwell. The novel eventually sold more than 20 million copies before it went out of print; it was reissued in 1999 and has metamorphosed into an icon of pop culture. The reporter Noel Holston notes that it is used in university-level courses in women's studies (Holston). The critic... |
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| Essay on Grace Metalious Biography » |
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| Essay on D'Arcy McNickle Biography |
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| D'Arcy McNickle Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. D'Arcy McNickle, a historian and educator who was an early advocate of Native American literature and ethnohistory, is best known for his novel The Surrounded (1936), a tragic evocation of white-Indian relationships and the first depiction of Indians in fiction who do not wish to assimilate with white culture. His other adult novel, Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978), appeared posthumously. He worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and for numerous agencies that were trying to improve the lives of Native Americans. In his fiction he demonstrates the early use of the mixed-blood, or "half-breed," protagonist who, alienated from white culture, attempts to reclaim his identity within the tribe. These themes... |
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| Essay on D'Arcy McNickle Biography » |
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| Essay on Larry McMurtry Biography |
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| Larry McMurtry Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Larry McMurtry, a descendant of Texas cattle ranchers, is the prize-winning author of more than 20 novels, mainly about frontier and modern Texans. Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove (1985), a work credited with forever changing the traditional Western, he is also particularly admired for such novels as Horseman, Pass By (originally published as Hud in 1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), Terms of Endearment (1975), and The Last Picture Show, all of which were made into popular feature-length films. The Last Picture Show, which McMurtry cowrote (with Peter Bogdanovich), won an Oscar for best screenplay. Central to many of McMurtry's novels is the dreary, dry fictional town... |
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| Essay on Larry McMurtry Biography » |
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| Essay on Terry McMillan Biography |
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| Terry McMillan Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. After publishing her first short story at age 25 and her first novel, Mama (1987), at age 26, Terry McMillan became one of the first African-American crossover novelists, a popular as well as a critical success, read by everyone, and appearing high on all the best-seller lists. Her third novel, Waiting to Exhale (1992), stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for months and has sold nearly 4 million copies. In 2001 she published her fifth novel, A Day Late and a Dollar Short; in 2002 she received the Essence Award for Excellence in Literature; and in 2003 she published her sixth novel, The Interruption of Everything. McMillan is also the editor of Breaking Ice: An Anthology of... |
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| Essay on Terry McMillan Biography » |
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| Essay on Claude McKay Biography |
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| Claude McKay Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Claude McKay was one of the most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Although primarily known as a poet--he published four collections--McKay also wrote novels and short fiction. Home to Harlem (1928), a story about a black soldier who returns to Harlem after serving in France during World War I, was one of the earliest African-American novels to enjoy popular success and a large readership. McKay wrote two additional novels, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933), the most critically acclaimed of the three. In addition, McKay wrote his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), full of intriguing anecdotes and commentary about his fellow writers but not... |
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| Essay on Claude McKay Biography » |
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| Essay on Jay McInerney Biography |
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| Jay McInerney Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Having gained national attention with the publication of Bright Lights, Big City (1984), Jay McInerney gained a reputation as a modern-day F. Scott Fitzgerald, a chronicler of the glamorous and fast-paced New York City yuppie elite. In his five subsequent novels McInerney turned his satirist's eye to the angst of the wealthy youth who turn to drugs and alcohol when they fail to reach their goals or discover the emptiness at the core of their lives. Particularly admired for his dry wit and his cynical, penetrating presentation of lost and fashionable degenerates, he has also become a representative of the "Literary Brat Pack" that includes Tama Janowitz, Bret Easton Ellis, and David Leavitt. Jay McInerney... |
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| Essay on Jay McInerney Biography » |
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| Essay on Alice McDermott Biography |
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| Alice McDermott Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. For more than a decade, notes the reviewer Joan Acocella, Alice McDermott has been one of American fiction's preeminent realists" (Acocella). She has earned praise and a devoted readership for her tales of first-, second-penury and loneliness to the upward mobility of the affluent and privately educated. In addition to her best-selling novel, At Weddings and Wakes (1992), for many readers her masterpiece, McDermott won the National Book Award and American Book Award for Charming Billy (1999). Most of her many characters live in the Irish-Catholic areas of Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s, as did McDermott herself. Alice McDermott was born on June 27, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York... |
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| Essay on Alice McDermott Biography » |
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| Essay on Carson McCullers Biography |
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| Carson McCullers Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A rarity among 20th-century American women writers, Carson McCullers, always associated with the writers of the Southern Gothic tradition, never went out of fashion and most of her work never went out of print. In a simple, fable-like style, McCullers produced short stories, novels, and plays, often marked by grotesque or violent plots, and featuring lonely, questing, adolescent protagonists. Compared favorably to William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty, McCullers produced a remarkable amount of work before her untimely death at age 50, of a stroke. The author of the short story "Wunderkind," published when she was 19, McCullers is remembered for The Heart Is A Lonely... |
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| Essay on Carson McCullers Biography » |
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| Essay on Sharyn McCrumb Biography |
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| Sharyn McCrumb Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Award-winning writer Sharyn McCrumb is acclaimed for all three of her mystery series: the "Ballad," those featuring Elizabeth MacPherson, and the Jay Omega novels. Her novels combine murder with mystery, community, and ancestry, most of which is associated with the Appalachians. As McCrumb remarked in an interview, "I think our culture has become so huge that you have to specialize, you have to get yourself some kind of little personal identity . . . and in each one of my books, if you think about it, a murder is committed to protect an assumed cultural identity" (Herbert, 32). McCrumb has received two Agatha and two MacAvity Awards; She Walks These Hills (1994) received the Nero Award, Agatha... |
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| Essay on Sharyn McCrumb Biography » |
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| Essay on Jill McCorkle Biography |
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| Jill McCorkle Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jill McCorkle grew up in Lumberton, North Carolina, and most of her novels take place in that state. She writes about young women making their way to adulthood and enduring the often damaging social rituals of Southern life in small and unchanging communities. McCorkle first drew the attention of critics when she simultaneously published two novels in 1984: The Cheer Leader and July 7th. In her subsequent novels--Tending to Virginia (1987), Ferris Beach (1990), and Carolina Moon (1996)--the women are older and more complicated. The same is true in Crash Diet (1992), a volume of short stories. The Cheer Leader depicts Jo Spencer, who moves from a successful last year of high school to a calamitous... |
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| Essay on Jill McCorkle Biography » |
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| Essay on Mary McCarthy Biography |
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| Mary McCarthy Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Mary McCarthy earned a reputation as one of the foremost American intellectuals of the 20th century. McCarthy approached major sociological, political, and sexual issues by using multiple genres, particularly the novel and the essay, and often using satire to achieve her ends. McCarthy's enduring topic was the meaning of America and of being American. To the general public, she remains best known for The Group (1963), a novel that characterized McCarthy's own era. McCarthy wrote six other critically acclaimed novels, including The Company She Keeps (1942) and The Groves of Academe (1952). Five years before her death, McCarthy received the 1984 Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding... |
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| Essay on Mary McCarthy Biography » |
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| Essay on Cormac McCarthy Biography |
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| Cormac McCarthy Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. In the opinion of many critics, Cormac McCarthy is America's most talented author of novels set in the West. They often divide his work into a Southern period and a Western period; included in the former are the Tennessee-based novels, The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1974), and Suttree (1979). McCarthy has been compared with Southern gothic and grotesque writers, especially William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, and with Katherine Anne Porter. Although his earlier novel about the West--Blood Meridian; Or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)--appears to be more violent, his Texas work constitutes a remarkable revisioning of the mythic American West. The McCarthy... |
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| Essay on Cormac McCarthy Biography » |
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| Essay on Peter Matthiessen Biography |
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| Peter Matthiessen Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Peter Matthiessen, one of the few American authors to have received major awards in both fiction and nonfiction, has enjoyed an impressive 40-year career. He received National Book Award nominations in 1966, for At Play In The Fields Of The Lord, and in 1972, for The Tree Where Man was Born. He also won two National Book Awards in 1980, both for The Snow Leopard. A writer as well as a commercial fisherman, a deep-sea fishing boat captain, and a member of numerous worldwide expeditions, Matthiessen is better known in some circles for his nature and travel writings; nonetheless, as the scholar William Dowie points out, he "sees the novel as the form of his deepest inspirations and the role of novelist... |
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| Essay on Peter Matthiessen Biography » |
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| Essay on Bobbie Ann Mason Biography |
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| Bobbie Ann Mason Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Bobbie Ann Mason has a secure niche in contemporary Southern fiction. Twice nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award--the second time for her novel Feather Crowns (1993)--which also received a Southern Book Award, Bobbie Ann Mason has written short stories, memoir, and critical essays. Her fiction is represented in major anthologies, and her work regularly appears on the reading lists of college courses. Stylistically, Mason is frequently called a minimalist, a writer identified with the "K-Mart school of fiction," "dirty realism," or "grit lit." She was among the first to use the brand names of popular culture as background for her characters. Although best known for her short stories... |
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| Essay on Bobbie Ann Mason Biography » |
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| Essay on Paule Marshall Biography |
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| Paule Marshall Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Paule Marshall, winner of a 1992 MacArthur Prize for lifetime achievement, is the author of five novels and two collections of short fiction. Her most widely read novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), is now considered a classic American coming-of-age novel. Marshall has also written The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Daughters (1991), and The Fisher King (2000), as well as the story collection Reena and Other Stories (1983) and the novella collection Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1988). She writes about African-American identity and its relationship to the African diaspora, the significance of ancestry, and a sense of bicultural existence... |
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| Essay on Paule Marshall Biography » |
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| Essay on John P. Marquand Biography |
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| John P. Marquand Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John P. Marquand, like Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis, and James Gould Cozzens, wrote novels of manners that both venerated and satirized the upper classes. He centered on those of New England, particularly the inhabitants of Boston. He is known for the Pulitzer Prize winner The Late George Apley (1937) and for the mystery series featuring a Japanese detective, Mr. Moto, a diminutive man who speaks flawless English along with numerous Chinese dialects. Marquand made the flashback his trademark in more than 20 novels; typically, his characters are successful professionals immersed in thought and self-analysis, energized by reminiscences. Many of Marquand's works were adapted for stage... |
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| Essay on John P. Marquand Biography » |
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| Essay on Albert Maltz Biography |
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| Albert Maltz Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although Albert Maltz was best known for the screenplays of This Gun for Hire (1942), Destination Tokyo (1944), Pride of the Marines (1945), The Naked City (1948), or, more recently, Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), he was also a novelist and short story writer, much of whose work exemplifies the protest literature of the 1930s. Maltz was one of the Hollywood Ten, those who refused to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee during the anti-Communist hearings of 1947. During the years he was blacklisted from the Hollywood studios, Maltz wrote offscreen fiction, including essays, novels, and screenplays for which he did not receive onscreen credit. His most... |
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| Essay on Albert Maltz Biography » |
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| Essay on Bernard Malamud Biography |
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| Bernard Malamud Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the preeminent writers of the last half of the 20th century, novelist and short story writer Bernard Malamud won both critical and popular acclaim, garnering two National Book Awards, for The Magic Barrel (1958) and The Fixer (1966); and the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer. Many readers and critics consider The Assistant (1957) to be his most accomplished novel. Malamud, along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth composing the triumvirate of Jewish-American literature as they were sometimes called, was known for his characteristic blending of fantasy and reality, folktale or myth, as his characters--Jews and non-Jews metaphorically imprisoned by their individual ghettos--both seek moral... |
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| Essay on Norman Mailer Biography |
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| Norman Mailer Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Norman Mailer has been famous since the publication of The Naked and the Dead (1948), when he was 25 years old. He began then to grapple with a theme that would intrigue him for the rest of his career: misuse of power in all its manifestations. During Mailer's long career as a novelist, essayist, political activist, producer, director, and actor, he has been both controversial and provocative, evolving into a practitioner of "American existentialism" that, the scholar Robert Merrill explains, is rooted "in the hipster and characterized by a deep commitment to instinct as opposed to reason" (Merrill, 20). As an experimentalist, Mailer has written several amalgams of fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and... |
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| Essay on Norman Mailer Biography » |
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| Essay on Ross Macdonald Biography |
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| Ross Macdonald Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Ross Macdonald, the creator of Lew Archer, private investigator, is considered by many critics to be the equal of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, both of whose influence Macdonald acknowledged. Macdonald's hero--named after Miles Archer, a character in Hammett's classic novel The Maltese Falcon--evolved from a hard-boiled sleuth into a sensitive hero who plumbs the intricate depths of evil, sometimes caused by desire and deceit. As Bernard A. Schopen notes, in Macdonald's Archer novels, themes include "exile and return, the search for the father, the quest for identity," all of which have "at their core the desire for love" in all its manifestations (Schopen, 15). The books are known... |
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| Essay on Ross Macdonald Biography » |
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| Essay on John D. MacDonald Biography |
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| John D. MacDonald Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John D. MacDonald, most famously the creator of fictional Florida private investigator Travis McGee, was also a popular writer of science fiction, suspenseful detective fiction, and issue-oriented mainstream fiction. His highly regarded science fiction stories appeared in magazines alongside those of Isaac Asimov; his first Travis McGee novel, The Deep Blue Good-By, introduced a series that eventually produced more than 20 novels. (The Green Ripper won the National Book Award in 1980 and was included in critic H. R. F. Keating's 1987 list of the 100 best crime novels.) His novel Condominium (1977), excoriating Florida land developers, was a best-seller. In total, MacDonald wrote more than... |
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| Essay on Peter Maas Biography |
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| Peter Maas Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Peter Maas, writer, editor, and investigative reporter, was the author of more than 13 books, although only one of them, Made in America (1979), was a novel per se. Such nonfiction best-sellers as The Valachi Papers (1969) and Serpico (1973) were praised for their novelistic qualities and adapted into successful films and television series. As the critic and novelist Evan Hunter has noted, Maas was equally talented at evoking character and setting, whether "the barren moonscape of a South Bronx street or the languid luxury of a northern Westchester tennis court" (Hunter, 9). Peter Maas was born on June 27, 1929, in New York City. He was educated at Duke University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1949... |
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| Essay on Peter Maas Biography » |
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| Essay on Alison Lurie Biography |
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| Alison Lurie Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Alison Lurie, recipient of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize as well as 1984 nominations for the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, all for her novel Foreign Affairs (1984), is a professor and critic best known for her witty, satiric novels about the extramarital affairs and identity crises of upper-middle-class intellectuals. Of particular note are The War between the Tates (1974), The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988), and The Last Resort: A Novel (1998), all of which reveal the Lurie trademark unmasking of characters who would deny the pride and self-deception that constrains their potentially rich lives. Lurie has chronicled women's lives before and after the feminist... |
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| Essay on Lois Lowry Biography |
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| Lois Lowry Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. In addition to being the creator of Anastasia Krupnik, the star of a famous series of young adult novels. Lowry is the author of The Giver, a dystopian novel in that series that has won more than 10 awards and has been adopted as the all-city read in many municipalities around the country. The Giver has been favorably compared to such classic novels as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1933), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and George Orwell's 1984 (1940). Known primarily for her award-winning children's novels, Lois Lowry's novels often cross the line between adolescent and adult audiences. In both genres, as the critic Walter Lorraine has noted, Lowry is a writer "who really ha[s] something to say"... |
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| Essay on Lois Lowry Biography » |
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| Essay on H. P. Lovecraft Biography |
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| H. P. Lovecraft Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Before his death, H. P. Lovecraft's macabre tales reached cult status among contemporary scholars, but today even mainstream readers increasingly view him as the descendant of Edgar Allan Poe and the literary ancestor of the writer Stephen King. Erudite, sickly, fascinated with the poetic power of words to conjure up the scientific possibilities of the cosmos, Lovecraft published more than 100 stories, novels, poems, and articles during his brief lifetime. Lovecraft also wrote three short novels: The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941), and At the Mountains of Madness (1936). No book-length collections appeared until 1939, two years after his death... |
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| Essay on H. P. Lovecraft Biography » |
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| Essay on Anita Loos Biography |
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| Anita Loos Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Anita Loos, novelist, playwright, and prolific screenwriter, wrote more than 150 Hollywood screenplays, yet today she is best known for her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925). Lorelei, a pretender of innocence and the heroine of the novel, became a household name. Together with her fictional friend Dorothy, she traveled to Europe, met men of every class, and turned all their heads. The novel became a film and a Broadway play, and won accolades from critics and readers alike for its comic, satiric treatment of Lorelei and her suitors. Loos followed it up with a sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928). The equation of blondes with sunshine, naivete, and goodness... |
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| Essay on Jack London Biography |
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| Jack London Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jack London--an adventurer, gold prospector, seaman, rancher, Darwinian, and socialist--saw himself as an exemplar of the Horatio Alger myth; he enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity as a writer of novels, short stories, essays, and war correspondence, and his corresponding rags-to-riches existence was perfectly suited to the stuff of American legend. His place in American literature, however, is based on the quality of his writing rather than on his intriguing life. During the early 20th century, he became the most popular writer in the United States. His first Northland novel, The Call Of The Wild (1903), written when he was 27 years old, has been translated into more than 80 languages... |
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| Essay on Sinclair Lewis Biography |
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| Sinclair Lewis Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Sinclair Lewis, winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith and the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, in 1930, wrote about American types, their foibles, and small towns. His satiric novels still resonate with readers today. Lewis's fictional places, Gopher Prairie, for instance, of Main Street (1920), and types--George F. Babbitt of Babbitt (1922) and the protagonist of Elmer Gantry (1927)--have not only entered the literary consciousness but have become international symbols for the back-slapping can-do American and the hypocrisy of a certain decadent mode of fundamentalist. His depiction of the American small town as hypocritical, vulgar, and gossipy rather than moral... |
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| Essay on Jonathan Lethem Biography |
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| Jonathan Lethem Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jonathan Lethem, called the Don DeLillo of his generation, is admired for his experimentation with and blending of many genres, including hard-boiled crime fiction, science fiction, romance, and satire. As his editor, Bill Thomas, says, Lethem "has gone from unknown to cult figure, breakout critical darling and now, if all goes according to plan, mainstream 'great American writer' " (Zeitchik, 38). His novella The Happy Man was a finalist for the Nebula Award in 1991; he won a World Fantasy Award for best story collection for The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye: Stories (1996), and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn (1999). The Fortress of Solitude, his most recent... |
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| Essay on Jonathan Lethem Biography » |
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| Essay on Meridel Le Sueur Biography |
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| Meridel Le Sueur Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Meridel Le Sueur, political writer and poet, has only recently been recognized for her achievements as a novelist. As with Tillie Olsen, Le Sueur gained national recognition for her portraits of the poor and inarticulate, only to find during the McCarthy era that her radicalism was cause for blacklisting. Her modernist novel, The Girl, written in 1932, was not published in book form until 1978 despite the author's experimental use of dialogue and attempt to fuse the working class experience with poetic, affective imagery on the one hand and realistic, sometimes grotesque, description on the other hand. Belated recognition came too for her Harvest Song: Collected Stories and Essays... |
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| Essay on Ursula Le Guin Biography |
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| Ursula Le Guin Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The preeminent early feminist voice in the writing of science fiction, Ursula Le Guin not only crossed over from science fiction and fantasy into mainstream literature but also, through her feminist and ecological stance, contributed significantly to the development of the genre. Typically, her characters embark on quests that should (but do not always) redress the imbalance that they seek to correct. In the last 40 years Ursula Le Guin won the Nebula and Hugo Awards from the International Science Fiction Association for The Left Hand Of Darkness (1969), one of the most admired science fiction novels of the 20th century, and the Nebula, Hugo, Jupiter, and Jules Verne Awards, all for The Dispossessed... |
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| Essay on Ursula Le Guin Biography » |
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| Essay on Harper Lee Biography |
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| Harper Lee Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Harper Lee's one and only novel has sustained her reputation since its publication in 1960. To Kill a Mockingbird has been a huge critical as well as popular success. It received the Pulitzer Prize, was a Literary Guild selection and a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate, and was made into an Academy Award-winning film. It has become required reading in almost all American high schools. The book received largely positive reviews, and the most discerning readers and critics also noted the artistry of the narrative device, in which a mature woman recalls deeply ingrained childhood memories of herself and her brother in the South during the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Nelle Harper Lee... |
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| Essay on Harper Lee Biography » |
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| Essay on David Leavitt Biography |
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| David Leavitt Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. David Leavitt is a novelist who first came to public attention when one of his short stories was published in The New Yorker in 1983, while he was still a student at Yale University. The following year his story collection Family Dancing won nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Since then he has built a reputation as one of the most eloquent writers about the difficulties of being gay in a straight world. David Leavitt was born on June 23, 1961, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Harold Jack Leavitt, a Stanford University professor, and Gloria Rosenthal Leavitt, a housewife and political activist. He was reared in Palo Alto, California, and educated... |
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| Essay on David Leavitt Biography » |
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| Essay on Caroline Leavitt Biography |
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| Caroline Leavitt Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The prizewinning short story writer Caroline Leavitt is also the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, including the semiautobiographical Coming Back to Me (2001), based on Leavitt's own trouble-fraught childbirth experience. Girls in Trouble (2004), her latest work, stems from Leavitt's encounters with adoption agencies. "All my novels are character-driven," Leavitt told the interviewer Tonya Ramagos (Ramagos), and her character portrayals have been praised by critics. Leavitt also favors multiple narratives, and most of her stories are told from the perspectives of at least two of the protagonists. Caroline Leavitt was born on January 9, 1952, in Quincy, Massachusetts... |
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| Essay on Nella Larsen Biography |
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| Nella Larsen Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Now recognized as one of the most important novelists of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen focused both her novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), on young women struggling with the conflicts resulting from mixed ancestry. Like her contemporary Zora Neale Hurston, Larsen resisted the polemics used by numerous Harlem Renaissance writers; she depended instead on her prose to demonstrate the effects of racial, class, and gender bias. Among her literary heirs are Maya Angelou and Alice Walker. Until the recent discovery of her birth certificate, Larsen was known by the name given her by the critic Mary Helen Washington: "Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance." She was born on April 13, 1891... |
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| Essay on Nella Larsen Biography » |
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| Essay on Joe Lansdale Biography |
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| Joe Lansdale Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Critically acclaimed "Mojo storyteller" and writer of "barbecue noir," Joe Lansdale has written numerous novels, novellas, and short stories set in the darker corners of life in rural Texas. Cited by the New York Times Book Review as possessing "a folklorist's eye for telling detail, and a front-porch raconteur's sense of pace," Lansdale's uncompromising, over-the-top approach to storytelling weaves elements of his own east Texas upbringing with settings and story lines that range from the down-home to the fantastic. His stories illuminate the taken-for-granted areas of everyday life, often constructing "lesser of evils" situations that ask readers to rethink their assumptions and desires. Lansdale's literary... |
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| Essay on Joe Lansdale Biography » |
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| Essay on Louis L'Amour Biography |
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| Louis L'Amour Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The premier writer of Western novels in the 20th century, Louis L'Amour won the National Book Award in 1980 for his novel Bendigo Shafter. As America's best-selling author of Westerns, at the time of his death L'Amour had nearly 200 million copies of his books in print. L'Amour wrote nearly 100 novels, more than 400 short stories for such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, collected in 20 volumes, and more than 65 television scripts. More than 45 of his novels and stories have been adapted for film and television. His novels made him popular with millions of readers because of their historically and geographically accurate details. They educated while they entertained, and his knowledge... |
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| Essay on Louis L'Amour Biography » |
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| Essay on Anne Lamott Biography |
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| Anne Lamott Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Anne Lamott, novelist, columnist, and political activist, first came to public attention with Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year (1993), an account of the first year of motherhood. She was not afraid to say to new mothers "that it's OK to have really awful thoughts" about their children (Hansen). Operating Instructions, which sold over 100,000 copies and is listed on the Modern Library's list of the best fiction of the 1900s, was followed by Bird by Bird, much more than a manual for aspiring writers; the latter sold over 200,000 copies. With a spot on National Public Radio and regular columns for Salon magazine, Lamott developed a readership for her six novels... |
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| Essay on Anne Lamott Biography » |
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| Essay on Judith Krantz Biography |
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| Judith Krantz Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. With more than 75 million copies of her novels in print, Judith Krantz is "one of the most published women in history" (Higgins). She did not begin writing until she was 48, and her first novel, Scruples (1978), appeared after her 50th birthday. Two years later, Krantz received $3.2 million for Princess Daisy, her second novel. Her first six novels were made into television miniseries produced by her husband, Steve Krantz, while I'll Take Manhattan, Till We Meet Again, Spring Collection, Dazzle, and The Jewels of Tessa Kent were made into television movies. In a 2002 interview, Krantz emphasized the long years of preparation for becoming a novelist. Although she has said she wishes she... |
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| Essay on Judith Krantz Biography » |
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| Essay on Jerzy Kosinski Biography |
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| Jerzy Kosinski Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jerzy Kosinski, writer, photographer, and teacher, is best known as the author of three highly disturbing novels: The Painted Bird (1965), the horrific account of a young boy's experiences in Europe during World War II; Steps (1968), sequel to The Painted Bird; and Being There (1971), a satiric portrayal of American pop culture. Steps won the 1969 National Book Award, while all three novels were made into feature-length films; particularly noteworthy is the award-winning Being There, for which Kosinski won the Best Screenplay of the Year award from both the Writers Guild of America (1979) and the British Academy of film and Television Arts (1981). Jerzy Kosinski was born on June 14, 1933, in Lodz, Poland... |
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| Essay on Jerzy Kosinski Biography » |
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| Essay on John Knowles Biography |
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| John Knowles Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Knowles, the author of nine novels, is known primarily for A Separate Peace (1960), winner of the William Faulkner Award for Outstanding First Novel. For more than four decades, the novel, made into a feature-length film in 1972, has appeared on many syllabi of high school classes. Its focus on the competition between boys at an Eastern private school and the moral that resolution of conflict should occur not through violence but through acceptance of difference is characteristic of most of Knowles's subsequent novels. A Separate Peace focuses on the friendship between Phineas, an athletic and popular boy, and Gene, his more intellectual and introverted friend. With World War II in the background, hostility... |
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| Essay on John Knowles Biography » |
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| Essay on Maxine Hong Kingston Biography |
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| Maxine Hong Kingston Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The "godmother" of Asian-American fiction in the United States, Maxine Hong Kingston has written three books that have made her one of the most influential and widely read novelists in contemporary American literature. Her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), has been translated into some three dozen languages and has been republished in numerous editions. The Woman Warrior, winner of the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award, and China Men (1980), winner of the National Book Award, are represented in most mainstream American literature classes, in Asian-American fiction courses, and in women's studies courses. Although both The Woman Warrior and China Men... |
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| Essay on Maxine Hong Kingston Biography » |
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| Essay on Barbara Kingsolver Biography |
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| Barbara Kingsolver Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Barbara Kingsolver is unique in her ability to write critically well-received best-selling novels that contain overtly political messages. She has said that when she was in her twenties she discovered the British writer Doris Lessing, "read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do, if I could ever do that" (Kingsolver). Her second novel, Animal Dreams (1990), won the 1991 PEN fiction prize and the Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award, and in 2000 Kingsolver was presented with the National Humanities Medal. Her novels about the West are... |
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| Essay on Barbara Kingsolver Biography » |
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| Essay on Stephen King Biography |
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| Stephen King Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The most successful and famous writer in the genre of horror fiction, Stephen King drew international attention with his first novel, Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power (1974), and has been writing award-winning novels and short stories ever since. With more than 300 million books in print (Official King website), King is frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe and has been praised, not only for his characterization, his New England settings, and his experiments with plot and genre, but also for his modern renditions of the fears lurking beneath even the sunniest of dispositions. He combines science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction to elicit those fears from his readers and uses... |
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| Essay on Stephen King Biography » |
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| Essay on Jamaica Kincaid Biography |
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| Jamaica Kincaid Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist, story writer, essayist, and memoirist, Jamaica Kincaid writes of paradox and duality: Antigua and New York, mothers and daughters, men and women, imperialism and individualism, homelessness and belonging. In Annie John, her best-known work, Kincaid focuses on the title character's painful adolescence and maturation. Those subjects resonate in her other novels: Lucy (1990), Autobiography of My Mother (1994), and Mr. Potter: A Novel (2003); and in At the Bottom of the River (1983), an acclaimed collection of short fiction; and Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip, an illustrated conversation among women. A Small Place (1988) is a long essay on the damages inflicted by colonialism; My Brother (1997)... |
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| Essay on Jamaica Kincaid Biography » |
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| Essay on Kim Ronyoung Biography |
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| Kim Ronyoung Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Kim Ronyoung, artist and writer, is the author of Clay Walls (1987), the first published novel written by a Korean American and presented largely through the perspectives of three family members. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it depicts the lives of first- and second-generation immigrants from Korea, and gives a voice to those immigrants whose voices had not been heard in the United States. Set in Los Angeles between 1920 and 1946, the novel is divided into three sections. The mother, Haesu, narrates section one; her husband, Chun, gives his views in section two; and their teenage daughter Faye presents her very different perspective in section three. The novel conveys to readers the strong sense... |
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| Essay on Ken Kesey Biography |
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| Ken Kesey Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Beatnik, pioneer hippie, public personality, counterculture and psychedelic drug guru, Ken Kesey was portrayed in Tom Wolfe's now classic account of the Merry Pranksters in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). Influenced not only by the Beat writers, but also by the New England Transcendentalists, Kesey studied the modernists Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, along with such Western writers as Zane Grey and John Steinbeck; Kesey shared their affinity with the Eastern mystics and other spiritual prophets and philosophers. Kesey epitomized the iconoclastic spirit of the 1960s; he despised bureaucracies and defended the poor and those living on the margins of society. Of his four published novels... |
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| Essay on Jack Kerouac Biography |
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| Jack Kerouac Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jack Kerouac became an American legend with the publication of his now classic, but once notorious, novel On the Road (1957). During the cold war era of the late 1950s, Kerouac and the Beat generation captured the imagination of the American public. As the novelist William S. Burroughs said, On the Road "sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road" (Charters, 1991, xxviii). This chronicle of Kerouac's American journeys, written in an exuberant, spontaneous style, remains the best known of Kerouac's 19 books, although he personally preferred Visions of Cody (published posthumously in 1972), and actually envisioned all his work as one big book... |
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| Essay on William Kennedy Biography |
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| William Kennedy Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. William Kennedy will forever be associated with his Albany novels, principally Ironweed (1983), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984. Ironweed was preceded by novels that progressed from a superficial to an almost mythic concern with Albany: The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978). Like James Joyce's Dublin or William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Kennedy's Albany--interconnected through novels he calls his Albany cycle--chronicles the history of a specific place, yet through symbols and myth addresses universal concerns. William Kennedy was born January 16, 1928, in Albany, New York, to William... |
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| Essay on William Kennedy Biography » |
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| Essay on Cynthia Kadohata Biography |
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| Cynthia Kadohata Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Cynthia Kadohata, who has been compared to Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Raymond Carver, and William Faulkner, has received positive reviews from both readers and critics for her two novels, The Floating World (1989) and In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1997). Set in the 1950s, when fresh memories of the Japanese internment and anti-Japanese sentiments still predominated in much of the United States, The Floating World is narrated by Olivia, its 12-year-old Japanese-American protagonist, who has already lived in California, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, and who travels with her family across America in search of jobs and a stable community. The journey portrays Olivia's relationship to her issei... |
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| Essay on Cynthia Kadohata Biography » |
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| Essay on Ward Just Biography |
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| Ward Just Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Ward Just, famed as a journalist and the author of 15 novels, was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Echo House, published in 1997. In 2001, Just won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for A Dangerous Friend, cited as the best historical novel on an American theme. He shared this award with Peter Matthiessen for Bone by Bone. Just's political novels, usually set in Europe, are praised for their comprehensive coverage of government, diplomacy, the military services, and the intelligence agencies, as well as their realistic detail and credibility. His midwestern novels, on the other hand, evoke a sense of what he calls "this flat, endless, rather sullen part of the world" where "people's... |
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| Essay on Ward Just Biography » |
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| Essay on Erica Jong Biography |
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| Erica Jong Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Exploding into the world of readers with her then shocking novel, Fear of Flying (1973), Erica Jong made publishing and literary history. On its publication in paperback in 1974, the novel sold 3 million copies in the first year (Templin, 29). Using the voice she had discovered in two volumes of published poetry, Jong portrayed her now famous Isadora Wing, a woman who is gleefully discovering and exploring her sexuality. In the decades since the 1970s, readers and critics alike have read Flying for its literary qualities, its affirmative feminist message, and its sexual frankness. Jong has continued to write in both genres, having published nine novels and 10 volumes of poetry, as well as the... |
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| Essay on Erica Jong Biography » |
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| Essay on James Jones Biography |
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| James Jones Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. According to many readers and critics, James Jones wrote the finest American novel to emerge from World War II. From Here to Eternity (1951) also sold more than 4 million copies and won the National Book Award in 1952. The novel became the first of a World War II trilogy that included The Thin Red Line (1962) and Whistle, published posthumously in 1978. Like many best-selling writers, Jones has been neglected by the academy; however, as literary criticism concentrates more on history and culture, he is being reconsidered in terms of his subject matter--because World War II directly influenced the generation of Americans who lived through it and indirectly influenced the generations that followed...
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| Essay on James Jones Biography » |
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| Essay on Gayl Jones Biography |
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| Gayl Jones Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Gayl Jones, an African-American writer admired for her complex and emotional use of blues music in fiction and her inclusion of first-person slave narratives, is also known for her nightmarish accounts of violence and abuse that are often painful to read. She remains, in the words of the scholar Kimberly N. Brown, "a literary enigma" who persists in plumbing "the fantastical and sometimes psychotic nether regions of her characters' minds" (Brown, 127). Jones, an essayist, poet, and short story writer, is best known for Corregidora (1975), a grim novel about three generations of African-American women, and Eva's Man (1976), an account of one woman's institutionalization for the murder of her lover. Gayl Jones was born... |
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| Essay on James Weldon Johnson Biography |
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| James Weldon Johnson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Poet, novelist, diplomat, songwriter, editor, critic, professor, and civil rights leader, James Weldon Johnson left a sizable impact on African-American literature and culture. His only novel, The Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man (1912), published anonymously, was reviewed largely as an expression of black sensibilities. It was reissued during the Harlem Renaissance, however, and since then has undergone positive reappraisals largely for its use of the unreliable narrator, irony, and the complex psychology Johnson employs to present the story of an individual and a society. James Weldon Johnson was born on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, to James Johnson, a headwaiter, and Helen Louise... |
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| Essay on James Weldon Johnson Biography » |
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| Essay on Dorothy M. Johnson Biography |
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| Dorothy M. Johnson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Dorothy M. Johnson is one of the most highly acclaimed 20th-century writers of Western literature. As scholars have noted, she brings a woman's perspective to the predominantly male-dominated genre. Hers was a no-frills approach; she wrote with a stark simplicity that evoked the reality of ordinary pioneer folk who took with them to the West nothing but courage, loyalty, honesty, and strength. She also produced numerous stories and novels about the Native Americans of Montana, depicting their struggles along with those of the pioneers. The Montana Blackfeet made her an honorary member and gave her the name Princess Kills-Both-Places, a tribute to her ability to see both the Indian and the white... |
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| Essay on Diane Johnson Biography |
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| Diane Johnson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Diane Johnson is particularly admired for her comic and satiric characters, usually women, who face chaos, disorder, and, frequently, violence. She has been nominated twice for the National Book Award, in 1973 for the nonfiction Lesser Lives, and in 1979 for Lying Low (1978). She received a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1983 for the nonfiction Terrorists and Novelists, a collection of book reviews and essays; a 1984 Los Angeles Times prize nomination in biography for Dashiell Hammett: A Life, and a 1987 Pulitzer Prize nomination for Persian Nights. Her 1997 novel, Le Divorce, was released as a feature-length film by Merchant-Ivory Productions in 2003. Diane Johnson was born on April 28, 1934... |
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| Essay on Diane Johnson Biography » |
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| Essay on Charles R. Johnson Biography |
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| Charles R. Johnson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Recipient of the National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage (1990), Charles Johnson has earned a wide readership and an enviable reputation. He is the author of four novels--Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), Middle Passage, and Dreamer: A Novel (1998)--and a short story collection. He is also a critic, screenwriter, editor, and professor of creative writing, as well as a former cartoonist and journalist. Essential to all his work are issues concerning race, social class, and gender, especially as they relate to the legacy of slavery. As a postmodernist, he experiments with literary styles and methods. Although his novels can be difficult to comprehend, Oxherding Tale... |
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| Essay on Charles R. Johnson Biography » |
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| Essay on Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Biography |
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| Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although she was well known when she lived in India and England, it is in the last quarter-century, since her move to New York City, that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has become famous as a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Her many awards include England's 1975 Booker Prize for Fiction for Heat and Dust. Her earlier novels, set in India, depict middle-class life among Indians (To Whom She Will [1955], The Householder [1960]) or feature British civil servants, expatriates, and travelers in India (Esmond in India [1957], A Backward Place [1965], Heat and Dust). Numerous critics have noted her gradual withdrawal from India in her fiction. Her first novel to be set in the United States... |
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| Essay on Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Biography » |
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| Essay on Sarah Orne Jewett Biography |
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| Sarah Orne Jewett Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Sarah Orne Jewett wrote novels and short stories that have endured for well over a century, and she is admired now not only for her depictions of the harmonious qualities of nature but also for her penetrating psychological and deeply felt spiritual insights. More than a local colorist, Jewett propounds ideas that link her to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Her portraits of women are eloquent, whether she is writing about marriage, friendships, mother-daughter relationships, or professional or artistic women. Famous for a number of finely wrought short stories, Jewett wrote five novels: Deephaven (1877), A Country Doctor (1884), A Marsh Island (1885), her masterpiece, The Country of the... |
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| Essay on Sarah Orne Jewett Biography » |
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| Essay on Tama Janowitz Biography |
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| Tama Janowitz Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although known in the 1980s as an enfant terrible and member of the literary "brat pack" that included the writers Jay McInerny and Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz garnered media applause with the publication of American Dad (1981), her first novel, an indictment of a professionally successful but philandering father. During the subsequent two decades, she has published eight novels, shedding along the way any doubts about her serious intentions or her writing talent. In fact, Janowitz's satiric, witty rendition of wealthy upper-crust New Yorkers has earned her a good deal of praise. Janowitz herself points to Edith Wharton, among others, as a strong influence, and the Whartonesque flavor to Janowitz's... |
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| Essay on Tama Janowitz Biography » |
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| Essay on J. A. Jance Biography |
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| J. A. Jance Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Winner of the American Mystery Award for her best-selling J. P. Beaumont series, set in Seattle, Washington. Jance is also the author of the popular Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady mysteries, set in Arizona, and a third series set on the Tohono O'othham reservation in Arizona. Although her settings are diverse, her protagonists are sympathetic and realistic; and Jance herself points out that she writes "with the understanding that my characters are people first and police officers second." J. A. Jance was born on October 27, 1944, to Norman Busk, an insurance salesman, and Evelyn Anderson Busk. She graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor's degree in 1966 and a master's... |
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| Essay on Harriet Jacobs Biography |
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| Harriet Jacobs Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1861), the most famous of the personal slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery and suffered the concomitant sexual abuse that so many African-American women endured. She had two children with a white man and was pursued by her owner and threatened with the loss of those children, whose freedom she finally secured. Although Jacobs's account of her experiences uses many of the novelistic techniques of 19th-century sentimental fiction, it significantly changed the slave narrative genre from the linear male narrative that recounted the move from slavery to freedom. Instead Jacobs pointed to more complicated issues: race, women's... |
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| Essay on Harriet Jacobs Biography » |
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| Essay on Shirley Jackson Biography |
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| Shirley Jackson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. In 1948, when Shirley Jackson published a short story called "The Lottery" in The New Yorker, she won a permanent place in American literature. This now classic tale, included in innumerable anthologies and taught in high schools and colleges across the United States, contains all the ideas that compelled Jackson in her short life: isolated and marginalized protagonists, often insecure young women, relegated to the fringes of society; the existence of evil in the human character, often marked through ritualized savagery; and bigotry, especially against African Americans and Jews. She had little tolerance for hypocrisy of any sort. For a time after her death, her reputation dwindled... |
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| Essay on Shirley Jackson Biography » |
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| Essay on Susan Isaacs Biography |
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| Susan Isaacs Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A writer praised for her talent in evoking the extraordinary from the seemingly ordinary woman, Susan Isaacs is a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and political speechwriter. She is ultimately an optimist despite the murder, wartime horrors, and political dangers that her characters experience, and is a winner of the 1999 John Steinbeck Award. Her books earn critical approbation for their wit, satire, and swiftly paced plots, and most have been either Book-of-the-Month Club or Literary Guild selections. Her mystery novels, in particular, have been praised for their literary quality. Susan Isaacs was born on December 7, 1943, in Brooklyn, New York, to Morton Isaacs, an electrical engineer, and Helen Asher... |
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| Essay on John Irving Biography |
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| John Irving Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Like the 19th-century English novelist Charles Dickens, John Irving is an immensely popular novelist who has received praise from contemporary book reviewers and literary scholars. His fourth novel, The World According To Garp (1978), sold over 120,000 hardcover copies and more than 3 million paperbacks, won an American Book Award, and fueled a 1980s pop culture phenomenon known as Garpomania. Of his 10 novels, The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) also combined critical success and Book-of-the-Month Club best-selling status, while The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer For Owenmeany (1989), and A Son of the Circus (1994) proved similarly successful with the reading public and the critics. Perhaps it is Irving's... |
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| Essay on John Irving Biography » |
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| Essay on Zora Neale Hurston Biography |
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| Zora Neale Hurston Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist, folklorist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and autobiographer, Zora Neale Hurston, a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, is now considered to be one of the great 20th-century American writers. Her work, which has been extensively reissued and reevaluated, consists of frequently anthologized short stories and four novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses: Man Of The Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). She co-edited the literary magazine Fire!!, and her short story "Spunk" appeared in the famous collection The New Negro (1925), edited by Alain Locke. Her pride in the richness of African-American folklore of the South... |
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| Essay on Fannie Hurst Biography |
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| Fannie Hurst Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Fannie Hurst, novelist and short story writer, is best known for her novel Imitation of Life, although critics and readers also admire Lummox (1923) and Appassionata (1926). From the 1920s to the 1950s, Hurst was praised for her vivid characterization of eastern European Jewish immigrants and young working women--many from the Lower East Side of New York--and for her sharply perceptive use of detail when describing American life and culture. The ebullience and vitality in her work suggests a comparison with the novelist Anzia Yezierska, but she was personally friendly with Ruth Bryan Owens, the daughter of William Jennings Bryan, Eleanor Roosevelt, Zora Neale Hurston, Rebecca West, and Zona Gale... |
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| Essay on Josephine Humphreys Biography |
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| Josephine Humphreys Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Born and reared in South Carolina, where she still lives, Josephine Humphreys's four novels reflect the changing culture of contemporary Charleston. In Dreams of Sleep (1984), Rich in Love (1987), The Fireman's Fair (1991), and Nowhere Else on Earth (2003), Humphreys writes about cultural upheaval and the disintegration of old values and family relationships; few readers, however, see hers as a pessimistic view. Rather, through skillful handling of plot, setting, characterization, and a highly poetic style, she usually suggests renewal and redemption for her characters, many of whom are innocent adolescents like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Carson McCullers's Mick Kelly or Frankie Adams... |
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| Essay on Josephine Humphreys Biography » |
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| Essay on Langston Hughes Biography |
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| Langston Hughes Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Langston Hughes is regarded as one of the most significant voices to emerge from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. He published more than 35 books and has been a staple of American literature and African-American studies programs for decades. Poet, dramatist, short fiction writer, novelist, lyricist, and journalist, Hughes was the first African American to earn his living by writing. He was untiring in his experimentalist search for new modes of expression, particularly through jazz, blues, and dialect; the result, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out, was no less than "an entire literary tradition" founded on "the actual spoken language of the black and working rural classes" (Gates and Appiah, xi)... |
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| Essay on William Dean Howells Biography |
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| William Dean Howells Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Familiarly known as the "Dean of American literature," William Dean Howells shaped American fiction for over 40 years. His contributions to American literature were extensive. In 1915, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Fiction--now known as the Howells Medal--from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. As a novelist, Howells was instrumental in defining and refining realism; most notably he demonstrated that a person's character played a role in his or her destiny, and he emphasized the significance of the ordinary over the rare and the strange. As editor of the Atlantic Monthly and, later, Harper's, he published established American writers and also encouraged younger ones such as... |
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| Essay on William Dean Howells Biography » |
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| Essay on Maureen Howard Biography |
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| Maureen Howard Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Writing of Maureen Howard's perennial interest in family dynamics, the critic Marc Robinson observes, "Not for her the cozy domestic zones where passions are labeled and personal histories are smugly untangled into 'relationships' " (Robinson, 46). Instead, Howard, author of eight novels and three novellas--in addition to short fiction, screenplays, literary criticism, and book reviews--has adamantly insisted on the individuality of each of her complex characters. These characters are usually strong enough to break free of the parameters around their preordained roles--those determined by society. Howard is, moreover, well known for vividly portrayed women who want to sever ties with their families... |
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| Essay on Maureen Howard Biography » |
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| Essay on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Biography |
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| Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although she wrote short stories and plays, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins's reputation rests on her work as a novelist, especially on Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). Her three additional novels were serialized in the magazine Colored American: Hagar's Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (1901-2), Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902-3). Hopkins wrote about racial oppression--particularly as expressed by liberal whites, and about miscegenation. She understood how sexuality and slavery are interconnected, the impact of this on the mixed-race woman... |
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| Essay on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Biography » |
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| Essay on Marietta Holley Biography |
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| Marietta Holley Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. In the words of the scholar Kate H. Winter, Marietta Holley, a humorist, novelist, and poet, "created the first sympathetic comic female figure in American literature" (Winter, 226). In the tradition of her contemporary Mark Twain, Holley used her loquacious protagonist Samantha, an uneducated upstate New York housewife living in the fictitious town of Jonesville, to present her take on such weighty issues as women's suffrage, temperance, and children's rights. She had her say on race relations in Samantha on the Race Problem (1892) and, through this rustic farm wife, Holley used humor to help make her criticisms palatable. Marietta Holley was born on July 16, 1836, near the village of... |
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| Essay on Marietta Holley Biography » |
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| Essay on Linda Hogan Biography |
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| Linda Hogan Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw, has won awards for her poetry, short fiction, drama, and essays, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Mean Spirit (1990). Because of her Chickasaw heritage, which was matrilineal rather than patriarchal, Hogan celebrates women for their natural creative powers and seeks to pass on to readers traditional Native wisdom through ancient myth. She illuminates the interconnectedness of the world. As an environmentalist, she also expresses the importance of respecting and caring for all forms of nature. Nearly all critics and readers note the poetic and lyrical nature of her prose and the power of her expression through myth and allegory. Linda Hogan was born on July 16, 1947... |
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| Essay on Linda Hogan Biography » |
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| Essay on Alice Hoffman Biography |
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| Alice Hoffman Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Alice Hoffman uses myths, spirituality, folk tales, and magic to depict ordinary Americans in extraordinary situations. The protagonists of her 15 novels are women or girls in suburbia whose lives are complicated by urban gangs, incest, AIDS, family relationships, sexuality, marriage, and divorce. Her style is deceptively simple, whether in dialogue between characters or in her use of symbols to deepen her fictional meanings. As Hoffman said to the interviewer Ellen Kanner, "Fiction in general gives you the freedom of exploring the truth without boundaries, to get to a deeper truth, and fairy tales have always been my model" (Kanner). Her work has been published in more than 20 languages and more than... |
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| Essay on Alice Hoffman Biography » |
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| Essay on Rolando Hinojosa-Smith Biography |
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| Rolando Hinojosa-Smith Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A significant contemporary Chicano writer, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith was awarded the Quinto Sol Literary Award in 1972 for his first novel, Estampas del valle y otras obras (Sketches of the Valley and Other Works), which became the first of eight novels in the "Klail City Death Trip" series. They are set in Klail City, Belken County, Texas, and chronicle six decades of the history of Chicanos and Anglos in the Rio Grande valley. The series's mythology and imagery, and its portrayal of tragedy, death, humor and hope, along with its interconnected and recurring characters, has earned him comparisons with William Faulkner. The series gives voice to the Mexican-American community... |
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| Essay on Rolando Hinojosa-Smith Biography » |
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| Essay on Chester B. Himes Biography |
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| Chester B. Himes Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although Chester B. Himes earned an international reputation for his detective novels written primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, American readers were slower than Europeans to appreciate his work. Two of his novels, however, were made into feature-length American films. And until recently, many considered him predominantly a writer of protest fiction. Apart from the 10 detective novels he published, Himes wrote novels in the naturalistic tradition, presenting characters doomed because of poverty, race, or class. All his novels, regardless of genre, demonstrate the need for society to reexamine itself and make needed changes. The End of the Primitive (1956), considered his best naturalistic novel... |
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| Essay on Chester B. Himes Biography » |
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| Essay on Tony Hillerman Biography |
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| Tony Hillerman Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Tony Hillerman, professor emeritus of journalism and author of nearly 20 crime fiction novels, has earned his reputation largely through his depictions of Native American characters and culture in his native Southwest. His detectives, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, right wrongs and solve murders on the "res," the 16-million-acre Navajo reservation that extends into parts of Arizona and New Mexico. "I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people but not for me," says Hillerman. "The first time I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench in the shade, I felt right at home. It was like a time warp taking me back to Sacred Heart," the small Catholic community... |
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| Essay on Tony Hillerman Biography » |
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| Essay on Oscar Hijuelos Biography |
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| Oscar Hijuelos Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) was what publishers call a breakout book. In 1990, this novel, his second, won a National Book Award nomination, a National Book Critics Circle Prize nomination, and the Pulitzer Prize. Hijuelos, son of Cuban immigrants and the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize, features realistic Cuban-American characters as they reach for the American dream but, one by one, fail to realize their full potential or to find their elusive identities. In his more recent books, Hijuelos embraces family and immigrant issues, and has emerged as the best-known contemporary Hispanic male novelist. Oscar Hijuelos was born on August 24, 1951, in New York City... |
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| Essay on Oscar Hijuelos Biography » |
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| Essay on Patricia Highsmith Biography |
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| Patricia Highsmith Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Patricia Highsmith wrote highly literate crime stories and murder mysteries and was renowned for using the murder mystery to explore human complexity, the reverberations of guilt, and the concepts of good and evil. She frequently employed doppelgangers, characters who seem similar but react in very different ways to the same ideas and events, and she injected a sense of fear into the reader and a persuasive sense of madness or abnormality into a character through her understated, clinical style. Highsmith also created homosexual characters at a time when these characters usually had to convert to heterosexuality in order to create a "happy ending." For most of her career, the reading public was... |
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| Essay on Patricia Highsmith Biography » |
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| Essay on Carl Hiaasen Biography |
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| Carl Hiaasen Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Carl Hiaasen is a Miami-based native Floridian who writes fast-paced thrillers that are simultaneously satirical, terrifying, and hilarious. As both a journalist and a novelist, Hiaasen wants to expose the corruption and greed that are behind the damage to Florida's wilderness areas. He loves the land and in his novels the eco-terrorists are heroes and the developers the villains. He has been compared to the realists Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair, because he too is a muckraker. His darkly humorous surrealistic scenes also invite comparisons to Nathanael West or Malcolm Lowry. Carl Hiaasen was born on March 12, 1953, in Plantation, Florida, to K. Odel Hiaasen, a lawyer, and Patricia Moran Hiaasen...
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| Essay on Carl Hiaasen Biography » |
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| Essay on Marcie Hershman Biography |
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| Marcie Hershman Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Marcie Hershman wrote the award-winning Tales of the Master Race, published in 1991; she lost many family members in the Holocaust, including a great-grandmother who died in Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp. This novel comprises interlocking short stories, but, as the title implies, Hershman uses the perspective of the "master race" rather than that of the Holocaust victims. Haunted, she says, by the voices of the past, she writes of the "Bavarian town" that, between 1939 and 1943, "had forever silenced more than half our family" (Hershman, 155). Tales of the Master Race exemplifies Hershman's use of irony and understatement. By demonstrating the blindness and rationalization... |
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| Essay on Marcie Hershman Biography » |
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| Essay on John Hersey Biography |
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| John Hersey Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Hersey, journalist, novelist, and historian, is always associated with Hiroshima, a memorable nonfiction account of the bombing of that Japanese city during World War II; it was based on interviews with six survivors and first published in The New Yorker in 1946. As the scholar David Sanders and others point out, Hiroshima is an ancestor of what came to be known as the "new journalism," exemplified two decades later by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (Sanders, 13). Hersey also wrote 14 novels and many short stories, and he thematically wove into his fiction the events of World War II, particularly the Holocaust, as well as social concerns like racial prejudice and inadequate education. A Bell for Adano... |
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| Essay on John Hersey Biography » |
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| Essay on Michael Herr Biography |
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| Michael Herr Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The journalist Michael Herr has written two novels, the first of which, Dispatches (1977), generally considered one of the best novels about the Vietnam War, assured him of a place in 20th-century American literature. It is an example of the New Journalism practiced by Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer (Carpenter). Herr also wrote the screenplays for two films about the Vietnam War: Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), the result of collaboration with the directors Stanley Kubrick and Gustav Hasford. His second novel, Walter Winchell: A Novel, appeared in 1990. Michael Herr was born in 1940 in Syracuse, New York; his father was a department store...
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| Essay on Michael Herr Biography » |
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| Essay on Mark Helprin Biography |
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| Mark Helprin Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Four accolades--the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Jewish Book Award, Prix de Rome from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Book Award nomination--for Ellis Island and Other Stories (1981), helped Mark Helprin earn serious attention from critics and readers alike. Some compared his use of magical realism to the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Schapiro). In addition to an earlier story collection, A Dove of the East and Other Stories (1975), Helprin, a former political columnist for the Wall Street Journal, has written four well-received novels--set in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Israel--all memorable for their "ambitious sweep" and "outsized... |
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| Essay on Mark Helprin Biography » |
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| Essay on Joseph Heller Biography |
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| Joseph Heller Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Joseph Heller will always be known as the author of a black comedy that gave the English language a new phrase, "Catch-22," meaning a bureaucratic trap and a dead end even for the individual exerting his best effort. Heller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this 1962 novel, an experimental, fragmented, absurdist view of World War II that earned praise from nearly all quarters and, in its era, was seen as a comment on the Vietnam War as well. Heller went on to publish five more novels; at least one of them, Something Happened (1974), is receiving renewed interest from literary critics. Heller, who always pits the individual against institutions like the federal government, the military, and large... |
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| Essay on Joseph Heller Biography » |
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| Essay on Robert Heinlein Biography |
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| Robert Heinlein Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the premier writers of science fiction in the 20th century and one of the earliest (some say the first) to reach mainstream readers, Robert Heinlein ranks with Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and H. G. Wells in the influence he wielded on the genre. Many younger writers cite the impact of his works on their own development. Unlike earlier science fiction writers who used futuristic settings largely as escape environments, Heinlein created a new concept: He enabled his young readers to understand that today's imagining is tomorrow's fact. Critics often cite the Apollo space program, with which Heinlein was involved, as an example of this phenomenon. Author of 31 novels (15 of them for adults)... |
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| Essay on Robert Heinlein Biography » |
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| Essay on Larry Heinemann Biography |
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| Larry Heinemann Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Like Tim O'Brien, Robert Stone, and Michael Herr, Larry Heinemann's subject is mainly the Vietnam War. He came to public attention with his first novel, Close Quarters, and followed it with the National Book Award-winning Paco's Story, a realistic, honest presentation of the ordinary soldier's experience in the thick of battle. Larry Heinemann was born on January 18, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois. As he explained in an interview with Ryan Nally, "My old man was a bus driver. My mother was a farm girl from Michigan. My mother's side of the family, oddly enough, is connected to Abraham Lincoln. I'm a sixth cousin. My father was born in Chicago and my mother came here in the 1930s and worked as a nanny... |
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| Essay on Larry Heinemann Biography » |
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| Essay on Carolyn G. Heilbrun Biography |
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| Carolyn G. Heilbrun Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, an influential English professor, literary scholar, and biographer, was widely respected for her studies of British literature and of fiction by women. Using the pseudonym Amanda Cross, Heilbrun also wrote a popular series of detective novels featuring feminist sleuth Kate Fansler. Initially, the identity of Amanda Cross was kept secret because of Heilbrun's position as a then untenured faculty member in Columbia University's English Department. Although the satirically witty Amanda Cross/Kate Fansler novels would appear to be unrelated to Heilbrun's academic work, a number of similarities soon become apparent. Like her creator, Kate Fansler was an English professor... |
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| Essay on Carolyn G. Heilbrun Biography » |
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| Essay on H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Biography |
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| H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Scholars have been studying H. D.'s entire oeuvre since the 1970s and have published numerous critical books and biographies about her life as a novelist, autobiographer, critic, and filmmaker. Her literary output was enormous and she was clearly more than an expatriate and modernist poet. Doolittle developed mythic themes in both poetry and prose; her theories on bisexuality were controversial and avant-garde. Over the course of her career, H. D. wrote seven novels, some of which have been published posthumously. After establishing a solid reputation as a poet, toward the end of World War I, H. D. began writing novels that, according to scholar M. Catherine Downs, can "best be described... |
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| Essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography and Novels |
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| Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography and Novels Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne is recognized as one of the most significant and influential shapers of American fiction in the history of our literature and as the author of at least two classic American novels, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. He also wrote some of the finest short stories in American literature and shared with his friend Herman Melville a pessimistic view of the human condition. The two are often called nay-sayers, contrasted with such transcendentalist yea-sayers as his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Conscious of the need to fashion a national literature, Hawthorne used his New England region as background and examined... |
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| Essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography and Novels » |
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| Essay on John Hawkes Biography |
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| John Hawkes Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Hawkes, a man never at ease with the traditional novel or conventional realism, wrote novels and short stories for nearly 50 years. Often classed with such postmodernists as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, Hawkes, too, rejected the usual truisms about character and plot. Instead, he concentrated on the desolate, chaotic, and nightmarish qualities of the contemporary psyche and to that end, incorporated scenes and details of lurid, violent, or bizarre subject matter repellent to some readers. Nearly all critics have commented too on the surreal, chimerical mood that Hawkes's style invokes, and on the black humor woven into some of his most horrific situations. The disconnections of the... |
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| Essay on John Hawkes Biography » |
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| Essay on Jon Hassler Biography |
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| Jon Hassler Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Many critics believe that Jon Hassler will be remembered as one of the best American writers of the last century. Writing with a quiet originality, he often uses an epistolary technique combined with flashbacks about love, hate, aging, evil, and death. Hassler also explores the tense relationships of those who live in the small towns of the American Midwest. A combination of comedy and spirituality has earned him comparisons with Flannery O'Connor (Plut), and the novelist Father Andrew M. Greeley believes that Jon Hassler is "one of the very best Catholic novelists since Graham Greene" (Plut). Hassler earned his reputation as a Catholic novelist partly through his many depictions of priests and nuns... |
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| Essay on Jon Hassler Biography » |
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| Essay on Kent Haruf Biography |
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| Kent Haruf Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Kent Haruf became a household name with the publication of his third novel, Plainsong (1999), winner of the Salon.com Award and a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award, New Yorker Fiction Award, and Los Angeles Times Fiction Award. Like William Faulkner, Haruf creates his own postage stamp of territory in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, a rural farming community. Haruf's style, however, is distinctly economical, more often compared to that of Ernest Hemingway. However, both modernist writers influenced Haruf to become a writer when he studied them in a college course. "I was just stunned by the quality and richness of their writing," he recalls. "It changed my life. I fell in love with... |
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| Essay on Kent Haruf Biography » |
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| Essay on Bret Harte Biography |
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| Bret Harte Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although Bret Harte wrote a number of novels and essays, he is best known today for such short stories about the American West as "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868) and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1869). For a time, they brought him popularity, fame, and fortune. During his year with the Atlantic Monthly, he earned more money from writing than any other American author to that date. Bret Harte wrote such witty, moving tales of frontier California that critics called him the "new prophet of American letters" and "Dickens among the pines." Eastern magazines courted him for submissions, and the San Francisco critic and writer Ambrose Bierce called his humor "incomparable." Harte helped establish... |
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| Essay on Bret Harte Biography » |
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| Essay on Kathryn Harrison Biography |
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| Kathryn Harrison Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. "I'm interested in taboos, who breaks them and how, and what the cost is," the novelist and essayist Kathryn Harrison told Bookreporter interviewer Janet Siciliano. Although she published three novels before her memoir, it was The Kiss (1997) that propelled Kathryn Harrison into public awareness and scrutiny. The Kiss, in part about Harrison's affair with her father when she was in her early twenties, generated enormous publicity, along with reviews titled "Know Thy Father," "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," "Blaming the Victim," and "Incest Chic." But since the furor has died down, Harrison has earned increased admiration not only for her cinematic, intense style, but also for her portrayals of different... |
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| Essay on Kathryn Harrison Biography » |
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| Essay on Jim Harrison Biography |
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| Jim Harrison Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A novelist, poet, and screenwriter, Jim Harrison has become a cult figure on some college campuses; his numerous readers hail him as a contemporary Hemingway figure. His writing is powerful and universal, concerned mainly with wanderers and misfits who experience love, adultery, obsession, violence, and vengeance; some critics, however, see this definition of masculinity as outdated and not representative of contemporary culture. In his early work, particularly the best-selling novella collection, Legends of the Fall (1979), which evokes Ernest Hemingway, Harrison's world is peopled largely by male protagonists who test themselves through their relationship to the natural world, often, as with Hemingway... |
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| Essay on Jim Harrison Biography » |
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| Essay on Colin Harrison Biography |
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| Colin Harrison Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Colin Harrison writes "intelligent thrillers" (Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2003). He won critical acclaim for his first novel, Break and Enter (1990), and is noted for his ability to blend significant ideas with the suspenseful plotting and the fast pace needed in this genre. He has published four additional novels--Bodies Electric (1993), Manhattan Nocturne (1996), Afterburn (2000), and Havana Room (2003)--all populated by characters who face moral dilemmas involving corporate boardrooms and domestic upheavals that tear the protagonists (they are always male) loose from their moorings. Colin Harrison was born on November 27, 1960, in New York City, to Earl Grant Harrison Jr., the headmaster of a private... |
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| Essay on E. Lynn Harris Biography |
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| E. Lynn Harris Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. E. Lynn Harris emerged on the literary scene in 1991 with Invisible Life, a novel, and has since published seven novels and What Becomes of the Brokenhearted: A Memoir (2003). The latter details the difficulties of being a gay man within the African-American community. With over 3 million books in print, Harris continues to mine the lives of young, black, middle-class city-dwelling professionals, both gay and straight. Harris's first and second novels became number one on the Blackboard Bestseller List of African-American titles. Just as I Am: A Novel (1994) also received the Novel of the Year prize from Blackboard African American Bestsellers (BAAB), and his third novel, And This Too Shall Pass... |
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| Essay on E. Lynn Harris Biography » |
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| Essay on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Biography |
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| Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A novelist who published more books than any other African American of her century and a short story writer, poet, teacher, lecturer, and abolitionist, Frances E. W. Harper is best known today as the author of Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), a novel set just before, during, and after the Civil War. Recently, the scholar and critic Frances Smith Foster discovered three other novels by Harper, originally published serially in the Christian Recorder over a period of two decades: Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876-77), and Trial and Triumph (1888-89). They were republished in 1994. As the critic Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina points out, readers need to reconsider her themes... |
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| Essay on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Biography » |
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| Essay on Ron Hansen Biography |
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| Ron Hansen Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although Ron Hansen's Catholic upbringing and religious concerns have earned him comparisons to the Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor, he examines philosophical and spiritual issues through the historical novel. He uses the genres of the Western (Desperadoes, 1979, for instance), and the murder mystery (Atticus: A Novel, 1996), sometimes combining the two in a style that has been praised for its eloquence, poetic cadences, and powerful use of imagery. He writes often about the relationship between father and son, and the intensely felt experience of religious faith (Mariette in Ecstasy, 1991). Hansen is the recipient of the 1991 Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts... |
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| Essay on Ron Hansen Biography » |
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| Essay on Barry Hannah Biography |
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| Barry Hannah Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Barry Hannah, author of nine experimental novels and one novella, as well as three collections of short stories, is a significant voice on the contemporary literary scene. He has won awards for both novels and short fiction, including the Award for Literature from the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979. Most recently, he received the 1994 Award in Fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Although born and raised in the South, Hannah went to Hollywood, where he wrote film scripts for the director Robert Altman, before permanently returning--via Montana and Iowa--to claim his Mississippi heritage. Identified with William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, whose Southern... |
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| Essay on Dashiell Hammett Biography |
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| Dashiell Hammett Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. When one thinks about hard-boiled detective novels, Dashiell Hammett's name comes up first. For more than a decade, he set the standards to which serious writers in the genre continue to aspire. Although he began writing for the pulp magazines of the 1920s, he became increasingly respected as an insightful portrayer of character, creating the now legendary private investigators Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon [1930]), Ned Beaumont (The Glass Key [1931]), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man [1934]), and the Continental Op (26 stories), all of whom are both believable and romantic. His major novels--The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and The Glass Key--were adapted for films in the 1930s and 1940s... |
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| Essay on Dashiell Hammett Biography » |
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| Essay on Jane Hamilton Biography |
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| Jane Hamilton Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jane Hamilton's novels evoke the farming communities and "prairie wholesomeness" (Steinberg) of the American Midwest, even as her vividly realized protagonists lead lives of anguish and tragedy. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth (1989), won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was an early Oprah book club selection, an event that lifted Hamilton from obscurity and made her an author "known to millions of Oprah fans" (Guinn). After its selection by Oprah, book sales increased from about 80,000 to nearly 1 million copies. Her next novel, A Map of the World (1994), was also selected for Oprah's book club, making Hamilton, along with Toni MORRISON and Wally Lamb, the only writers twice selected for these readers... |
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| Essay on Pete Hamill Biography |
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| Pete Hamill Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. In addition to his long career as an award-winning newspaper columnist, Pete Hamill has written the New York Daily News short story stories, "Tales of New York," and 10 novels, one of which, Snow in August (1997), was selected by Ohio governor Bill Owens for the 2002 "One State, One Book" program. This much-praised coming-of-age novel is about the preadolescent Michael Devlin, his widowed mother, Father Heaney, and Rabbi Hirsch, who teaches Michael how to create a golem, a mythical Jewish creature who can--and in this novel does--rescue the neighborhood from the vicious neighborhood gang, the Falcons. Two other novels, Flesh and Blood (1977), about a boxer, and The Gift (1973), frequently compared... |
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| Essay on Jessica Hagedorn Biography |
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| Jessica Hagedorn Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jessica Hagedorn has succeeded not only as a novelist, poet, and performance artist, but also as a playwright, screenwriter, editor, radio commentator, singer, and band lyricist. She won two American Book Awards: in 1983, for the novella and poetry in Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions, and in 1991, for her novel Dogeaters, which was also nominated for a National Book Award. Hagedorn, a postmodernist experimenter, mixes genres (from radio transcript excerpts to historical accounts to gossip columns) and effectively blends English, Spanish, and Tagalog, all of which she spoke in her native Philippines before immigrating to the United States. Jessica Hagedorn was born on May 29, 1949, in Manila... |
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| Essay on Jessica Hagedorn Biography » |
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| Essay on Ha Jin Biography |
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| Ha Jin Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Ha Jin, a Chinese-American novelist, won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his second novel, Waiting (1999). He had already won three Pushcart Prizes, as well as a Flannery O'Connor Award, for stories collected in Under the Red Flag (1996). His first novel, In the Pond (1998), earned good reviews, but the most laudatory were reserved for Waiting, which depicts life in China under communism. Jin writes in English, as did the Polish-born British writer Joseph Conrad and the Russian-born American writer Vladimir Nabokov, and he has noted that English has "many levels of diction and meaning." Chinese, he says, "is a very earthy language" (Schroeder). Ha Jin (his name was Xuefei Jin)... |
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| Essay on David Guterson Biography |
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| David Guterson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. David Guterson's first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), a love story, murder mystery, and courtroom drama about a Japanese-American woman and a reporter who grow up together in the San Juan Islands until her family was interned during World War II, remained on the New York Times best-seller list for over a year, sold over 2.5 million copies in paperback, and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1995. Continuing his chronicle of what the writer and reviewer Tom Deignan calls "the struggles and victories of fundamentally decent people" (Deignan), Guterson is also the author of East of the Mountains (1999), the odyssey of a World War II veteran determined to commit suicide. Because of its... |
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| Essay on David Guterson Biography » |
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| Essay on Allan Gurganus Biography |
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| Allan Gurganus Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Allan Gurganus exploded onto the literary scene in 1989 with his first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All; it remained on the best-seller lists for months. He is most frequently praised for his storytelling abilities and the way in which he invents realistic voices for all his characters, male or female, black or white, old or young. In attempting to explain the source of his inspiration, he said that (like many Southerners) he grew up in a house where any one of four generations could walk through a doorway at any time. Therefore, he was accustomed to living with the past, the present, and the future; and grew up "feeling and knowing" that "history is a daily force. We knew this because we... |
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| Essay on John Grisham Biography |
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| John Grisham Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Grisham's name is synonymous with the blockbuster legal thriller novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Beginning with The Firm (1991), which sold an astonishing seven million copies, the prolific Grisham has continued to mesmerize millions of readers and scores of critics with his ear for dialogue, page-turning plots, and his increasing attention to social issues like homelessness, racism, and the death penalty. In the words of the reviewer Deirdre Donahue, "John Grisham appears to be two writers inhabiting one persona. He is the creator of jet-fueled legal thrillers such as The Firm and The Pelican Brief. And, periodically, he reveals a slower-paced, more personal side as he did... |
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| Essay on John Grisham Biography » |
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| Essay on Zane Grey Biography |
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| Zane Grey Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Zane Grey (born Pearl Zane Gray) long ago assumed the status of legend, first for his classic novel, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), and, more important, for the way in which he helped preserve the spirit and carve the myth of the Old West. He also wrote one of the most popular and sympathetic novels about Native Americans to be penned by a white author: The Vanishing American (1925). Grey, the most popular Western novelist in American literary history, with over 63 novels to his credit, has been somewhat displaced in more contemporary times by such writers as Louis Lamour, but he retains iconic status to thousands of readers, even in the 21st century. Moreover, as interest in literary cultural perspectives... |
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| Essay on Joanne Greenberg Biography |
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| Joanne Greenberg Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Joanne Greenberg has written an impressive variety of fiction--16 books in all--set in the historical past and the contemporary era, covering rural and urban life from the world of academia to the world of the sightless, the lame, and the hearing impaired. It is, however, for her 1964 novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, that she is likely to be remembered. Written under a pseudonym because it mirrors Greenberg's own struggle with madness, the novel is an evocative representation of the world of schizophrenia from the varying perspectives of the patient, her parents, and the medical profession. Joanne Greenberg was born on September 24, 1932, in Brooklyn, New York, to Julius Lester Goldenberg... |
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| Essay on Joanne Greenberg Biography » |
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| Essay on Shirley Ann Grau Biography |
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| Shirley Ann Grau Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although Shirley Ann Grau has lived in and written about the Gulf Coast South, she refuses to identify herself as a writer in the Southern tradition, overtly distancing herself from William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor (Schlueter, 22), while admiring Carson McCullers for her power and originality, two traits that apply to Grau herself. Additionally, nearly all of Grau's novels employ multiple perspectives, a complicated technique that she executes with great skill. Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans, to Dr. Adolph E. Grau, a dentist, and Katherine Onions Grau. The family moved back and forth between New Orleans and Montgomery, Alabama, and Grau attended schools... |
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| Essay on Shirley Ann Grau Biography » |
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| Essay on Sue Grafton Biography |
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| Sue Grafton Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Sue Grafton, one of America's most widely read authors, said that when she "decided to do mysteries, I chose the classic private eye genre because I like playing hardball with the boys. I despise gender-segregated events of any kind" (Grafton and Taylor, 4). Along with such writers as Sara Paretsky, Grafton created the hard-boiled female detective and remade the classic male detective novel. Grafton is connected to Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator, as is Raymond Chandler with Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett with the Continental Op. Grafton's Kinsey, says Stephanie Stassel, is "One of the first modern hard-boiled female detectives. . . . a smart-mouthed, fast-thinking ex-cop." She is "based in... |
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| Essay on Mary Catherine Gordon Biography |
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| Mary Catherine Gordon Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Known primarily as a novelist, although she has written short stories as well, collected in Temporary Shelter (1987), Mary Gordon has published five novels and three novellas to date. She writes seriously and compellingly about women's issues and contemporary Catholicism, subjects that have caused her to be labeled both a "feminist" and a "Catholic novelist." While she accepts the feminist label, Gordon has strenuously resisted the Catholic one, insisting that Catholicism simply provides "esthetic standards" invaluable to a novelist (Bennett, 2). Regardless of the labels, Gordon has been praised for her artistry and the philosophical curiosity with which she fashions her novels, and... |
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| Essay on Caroline Gordon Biography |
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| Caroline Gordon Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Caroline Gordon, a modernist novelist and short story writer, was closely associated with the Southern Renaissance and the Fugitive/Agrarian movement. She wrote nine novels, numerous stories, and two books on literary theory--all of which affected the direction of American literature. Her fiction--including Penhally (1931), Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), and The Women on the Porch (1944)--demonstrates the talents that continue to attract admirers and devotees: superb stylistic achievement, development of the craft of narrative fiction, and the use of an unobtrusive narrator. Born in Todd County, Kentucky, on October 6, 1895, to James Morris Gordon, a Virginian and operator of a classical school... |
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| Essay on Caroline Gordon Biography » |
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| Essay on Myla Goldberg Biography |
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| Myla Goldberg Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Myla Goldberg's intriguing debut novel, Bee Season (2002), a book ostensibly about spelling bees but actually about the disintegration, transformation, and realignment of family relationships, captured the imagination of critics and reviewers and of avid readers and book club members. Goldberg does write about the distinct "subculture" of spelling bees (Giles), but she explores as well the quirky and sometimes debilitating environment inhabited by a family of intellectuals and achievers. As Susan L. Rife points out, the book ranges far afield of adolescent spelling gatherings to cover "Jewish mysticism, mental illness," and many attempts to connect with God (Rife). Goldberg also refers... |
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| Essay on Myla Goldberg Biography » |
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| Essay on Gail Godwin Biography |
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| Gail Godwin Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Admired primarily for her achievements in the genre of the novel--she has published 10 to date--Gail Godwin writes compellingly about the complexities of women's lives in the latter half of the 20th century; increasingly she emphasizes the significance of self-reliance and work in the lives of her heroes, most of whom live in the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia, and Maryland. Since Southern culture and attitudes play major roles in most of her novels and short stories, Godwin is one of those writers who has garnered critical acclaim in addition to popularity among contemporary readers; part of that popularity derives from her resistance to minimalism and postmodernist self-reflexivity and her use... |
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| Essay on Julia Glass Biography |
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| Julia Glass Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Winner of the 2002 National Book Award for her first novel, Three Junes, Julia Glass has written this novel and a number of short stories. Three Junes is structured as a triptych in which a large central portrait is flanked by two smaller ones; in the center is the story of Fenno McLeod, a gay expatriate Scotsman, now a New York bookseller. On either side of him subsidiary characters include family and friends who provide information about Fenno's background. Three Junes (2002) demonstrates the strength of both family relationships and intimate friendship during the month of June in three separate years (1989, 1995, and 1999). These close relationships provide solace and strength as effective antidotes to... |
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| Essay on Susan Glaspell Biography |
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| Susan Glaspell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Until recently, Susan Glaspell's reputation as a dramatist exceeded her reputation as a novelist; for instance, her play Alison's House (1930), based on the life of Emily Dickinson, won the Pulitzer Prize. Increased scholarly attention to Glaspell's novels, however, has resulted in several recent studies, particularly Martha C. Carpenter's The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell (2001). Reviewer Barbara Ozieblo says that Carpenter allows us "to understand why Glaspell always considered herself a novelist, first and foremost" (Ozieblo). Glaspell's nine novels are set in the Midwest, and all feature women seeking self-definition. Carpenter in fact asserts that "her writing is not conservative in its... |
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| Essay on Ellen Glasgow Biography |
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| Ellen Glasgow Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Like so many women writers in the 19th and 20th centuries, Ellen Glasgow was ignored in university classrooms for virtually the first half of the 20th century. Today, however, critics perceive her as one of the most important writers to revive Southern literature. Her novels used realism lacking in the novels of Thomas Nelson Page, among others, which set the standard for Southern literature at the turn of the century; she became a best-selling author between the turn of the century and the late 1930s. Twenty-first-century readers easily detect the ironic and subversive tone that Glasgow uses to write about the difficulties and disadvantages that white Southern women faced from the patriarchal culture... |
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| Essay on Ellen Glasgow Biography » |
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| Essay on Diane Glancy Biography |
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| Diane Glancy Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Diane Glancy, one-eighth Cherokee, an inheritance from the grandmother who greatly influenced her during adolescence, writes about the alienated status of mixed-blood people like herself. Although she won the American Book Award for Claiming Breath (1992), an essay collection, Glancy has recently focused more specifically on the novel, and has published seven to date. Her work as a poet and playwright and the frequent mixing of one or more genres helps her underscore the complex blending that constitutes a single individual. Similarly, Glancy notes the dichotomy between Christianity and Native spirituality, both belief systems to which she herself subscribes. Not surprisingly, her most successful... |
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| Essay on Charlotte Perkins Gilman Biography |
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| Charlotte Perkins Gilman Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A feminist revolutionary and a prolific writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is known now primarily for her novella The Yellow Wallpaper (1899). That work alone has made her an iconic figure for most feminists. She began her career as a poet and wrote nearly 200 short stories and numerous essays as well as Women and Economics (1898), the book that made her internationally famous. Only late in life did Gilman turn to novel writing, and both What Diana Did (1910) and The Crux (1911) were published in her magazine, The Forerunner. Her feminist utopian novels, Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916), followed. It is in these novels that Gilman proposed feminist... |
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| Essay on Ellen Gilchrist Biography |
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| Ellen Gilchrist Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Ellen Gilchrist, award-winning Southern novelist, short story writer, poet, and scriptwriter, may be seen both as a regionalist and as one whose ideas transcend the characteristics of a particular place. In her fiction she examines Southern women, as did Ellen Glasgow, but Gilchrist has also been compared to the Southern writers Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, and Tennessee Williams. Her novels can be measured, too, against those of the contemporary Southern writers Lee Smith and Bobbie Ann Mason, the California writer Alice Adams, or those of Joyce Carol Oates, a writer whose roots are in western New York State. Gilchrist never defines herself as a feminist per se. She addresses the struggle... |
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| Essay on Kaye Gibbons Biography |
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| Kaye Gibbons Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Kaye Gibbons has the rare ability to combine bold literary experimentation with accessibility. Her large audience appreciates both the depiction of strong and resilient female characters and Gibbons's use of language. According to the scholar Julian Mason, her work is memorable for its "images and metaphors, its rural Southern cadences, and the matter-of-fact power in its storytelling" (Mason, 165). In most of her novels, Gibbons uses a strong first-person narrator to delineate the problems inherent in family life, particularly among women who are neither affluent nor members of elite society; she addresses, too, the conflicts between the Old South and the New. Her success at this approach is exemplified... |
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| Essay on William H. Gass Biography |
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| William H. Gass Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Even more than the postmodernist writers with whom he is associated--John Barth, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkins, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, and John Hawkes--William Gass has focused on, speculated about, and experimented with the artifices and possibilities of language. He is equally well known for his visionary books, including the significantly entitled The World Within the Word (1978) and On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976). The latter is an exhaustive inquiry into, and commentary on, the uses of the word blue, from Plato to pornography, philosophy to poetry, and blue moods to blue laws. The appearance of his first novel, Omensetter's Luck (1966)... |
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| Essay on Hamlin Garland Biography |
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| Hamlin Garland Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Hamlin Garland, novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist, and literary critic, was among the first of the Western novelists to refuse to perpetuate the romantic Western myths and to insist on using realistic detail of the harsh life; these writers were sometimes called "prairie realists." Although he wrote more than 40 books, he is best known today for his story collection, Main-Travelled Roads (1891); his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border (1917); and family histories, including A Daughter of the Middle Border (1921), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Through his novels and stories he drew readers' attention to the difficult, often hardscrabble lives of rural folk in the upper... |
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| Essay on John Gardner Biography |
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| John Gardner Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Gardner, distinguished scholar and novelist, said, "If I was a policeman, I'd do something different. If I was an Air Force pilot, I'd do something different; if I was an undertaker, I'd do something different. But since I'm a writer . . . what I have to do is write fiction" (Stanton). That he did in 11 novels, two of which (Stillness and Shadows [1986]) were published posthumously and one of which (Jason and Medeia [1973]) is a novel in verse. Gardner also wrote two short fiction collections, two volumes of poetry, and scholarly works on two medieval English poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain Poet; as many critics point out, Gardner's novels were remarkable in their appeal to both... |
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| Essay on John Gardner Biography » |
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| Essay on Erle Stanley Gardner Biography |
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| Erle Stanley Gardner Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Erle Stanley Gardner, lawyer and author, combined both talents in creating Perry Mason, the most famous fictional lawyer in American detective fiction, film, and television. Mason was featured in more than 80 of Gardner's novels and, like his creator, believed in using the legal system to bring justice to the underdog. Unbelievable as it may seem, the Perry Mason novels have sold over 300 million copies. In addition to the Perry Mason series, Gardner wrote three other series with different heroes: Doug Selby, Terry Clane, and Grandpa Wiggins. Erle Stanley Gardner was born on July 17, 1889, in Malden, Massachusetts, to Grace Adelma Waugh and Charles Walter Gardner, a mining engineer who moved... |
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| Essay on Erle Stanley Gardner Biography » |
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| Essay on Cristina Garcia Biography |
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| Cristina Garcia Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Cristina Garcia's first novel, Dreaming in Cuban (1992), won praise from coast to coast and earned her a nomination for a National Book Award. The Aguero Sisters (1997), published to similar critical acclaim, was followed by Monkey Hunting in 2003. Of her mixed heritage, Garcia has commented, "The thing I hate most about the Cuban context is the attempt to limit what it means to be Cuban. Not too long ago at a reading I gave in Puerto Rico, a man stood up and said, 'You can't be Cuban because you write in English.' The point for me is that there is no one Cuban exile. I am here in California and may not fit in anywhere, but I am Cuban too. I think I am trying to stake out a broader territory" (Johnson)... |
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| Essay on Cristina Garcia Biography » |
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| Essay on Zona Gale Biography |
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| Zona Gale Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Zona Gale, novelist, short fiction writer, and playwright, published 34 books and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for her dramatization of Miss Lulu Bett, considered to be her finest novel. Known widely as a chronicler of village life, depicted in her fictional midwestern Friendship Village stories, Gale also wrote the best-selling novel Faint Perfume in 1923. After graduating with two degrees from the University of Wisconsin in 1895, Gale worked as a reporter for several publications, including the New York Evening World and several magazines based in New York. She lived there for three years before returning permanently to Portage, Wisconsin, where she spent the rest of her life. Romance Island (1906)... |
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| Essay on Zona Gale Biography » |
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| Essay on Mary Gaitskill Biography |
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| Mary Gaitskill Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Mary Gaitskill has been included with Tama Janowitz and Catherine Texier on lists of the so-called Bad Girl postmodernist writers. The seriousness with which critics are reading Gaitskill, however, is evident in reactions to her novel Veronica (2005), a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. She has attracted attention for her complex and compelling portraits of individual men and women who people the margins of society and frequently dwell in the darker, seamier streets of New York City. Gaitskill's explicit presentation of bodily detail and sexual encounters is balanced by her innovative, probing, sympathetic, and compassionate analyses of her sometimes heroic but more frequently depraved characters... |
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| Essay on Mary Gaitskill Biography » |
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| Essay on Ernest J. Gaines Biography |
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| Ernest J. Gaines Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Born on the River Lake Plantation in Point Coupee Parish, Louisiana, the eldest of 12 children, Ernest Gaines lived most of his formative years in this parish, which he was later to immortalize in his fiction. His parents separated when he was very young, an event that would result in a major fictional theme for the adult writer, the search for the missing father. At age 15 Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, to join his mother and stepfather and continue his schooling. He never ceased thinking of his native state, however, and his feeling of displacement would result in yet another of his fictional themes. Today the novelist Ernest Gaines is known, in Valerie Melissa Babb's words... |
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| Essay on Ernest J. Gaines Biography » |
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| Essay on William Gaddis Biography |
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| William Gaddis Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. In the 1998 obituary he wrote on William Gaddis for the New York Times, Mel Gussow observed, "He was often considered one of the least read of important American writers. But his books have become contemporary classics" (Gussow, C22). Indeed, since his death, despite the difficulties one encounters in reading his lengthy experimental novels, William Gaddis is increasingly considered one of America's most original postmodernist novelists. His first novel, The Recognitions (1955), is repeatedly described as encyclopedic, a satire of modern life. J.R. (1975), a pessimistic parody of modern materialism and its resulting wasteland, won the National Book Award. Carpenter's Gothic (1985), generally... |
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| Essay on William Gaddis Biography » |
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| Essay on Bruce Jay Friedman Biography |
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| Bruce Jay Friedman Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Bruce Jay Friedman, who coined the term "black humor," writes seriocomic novels, plays, and short stories about marginalized Jewish Americans living in a fragmented and frequently absurd America, an America that interviewer Michael Elkin calls "the less-than-genteel gentile world." The alienated, culturally conflicted title character of Stern (1962), the adolescent Joseph and his overbearing mother Meg of A Mother's Kisses (1964), and the lonely, symbolically scarred misfit Kenneth Sussman in The Dick (1970) (who changes his surname to LePeters) are typical Friedman caricatures. In his first novel, for instance, Stern, often compared by critics to Walter Mitty, survives suburbia, anti-Semitism... |
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| Essay on Bruce Jay Friedman Biography » |
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| Essay on Marilyn French Biography |
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| Marilyn French Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Marilyn French shocked the literary community with the publication in 1977 of her first novel, The Women's Room. Since then, the novel has become an exemplar of the 20th-century women's movement and the American feminist canon, as it decries the sexist attitudes in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. French wrote four additional novels, all of which examine an aspect of women's role in a patriarchal culture: The Bleeding Heart (1980) depicts the unequal and therefore doomed male-female relationship; Her Mother's Daughter (1987) examines the situation of women through four generations; Our Father (1994) reveals a dying man's secrets to his daughters; and My Summer with George (1996) depicts... |
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| Essay on Marilyn French Biography » |
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| Essay on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Biography |
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| Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, along with Edith Wharton, was among the first women elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters; she won the Howells Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Letters in 1926. Renowned for her 14 short-story collections, Freeman was also admired for her 13 novels, the most successful of which include Jane Field (1893) and Pembroke (1894). Her novels, like her short fiction, usually take place in New England villages, and contain realistic characters, several generations removed from their Puritan ancestors, who reflect concerns with duty, justice, self-reliance, and the righting of social wrongs. In her portraits of 19th-century women... |
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| Essay on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Biography » |
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| Essay on Lynn Freed Biography |
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| Lynn Freed Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Lynn Freed is the author of five novels, the last of which, House of Women (2002), received the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Although she lives in California, her novels are set in her native South Africa. In Heart Change (1982) and Home Ground (1986) the young Jewish girl, Ruth Frank, and her family, are emblems for white citizens of that nation. Lynn Freed was born on July 18, 1945, in Durban, to Harold Derrick Freed, an actor, and Anne Moshal Freed, a theater director. She earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Witwatersrand in 1966 and the following year emigrated to the United States, earning a master's (1968) and a doctorate (1972)... |
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| Essay on Lynn Freed Biography » |
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| Essay on Harold Frederic Biography |
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| Harold Frederic Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Harold Frederic was "rediscovered" in the 1950s, after having disappeared from the American literature canon following his death in England in 1898. Today he is seen as a significant contributor of realistic American fiction at the turn of the century, and as one who mapped out a fictitious literary niche for the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York where he was reared. Significant today, too, are his frank treatment of sexuality and his portraits of strong women. Although a number of his novels are set in Europe and England, his four Mohawk Valley novels including The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) and several stories are set in Octavius, his fictitious name for Utica, a city beset with poverty... |
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| Essay on Harold Frederic Biography » |
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| Essay on Charles Frazier Biography |
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| Charles Frazier Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Charles Frazier won the National Book Award, the Book Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, Cold Mountain, in 1997, a book that topped the New York Times best-seller list for several months. The novel received critical acclaim as well as popularity with readers for a number of reasons, not only Frazier's eloquent story-telling abilities, but also his original approach to the Civil War, that perennially popular topic. Instead of focusing on the war or its heroes, Frazier transforms the war into the backdrop of the novel and focuses on a Confederate deserter, on the one hand, and two women managing a North Carolina mountaintop farm, on the other. The book has been... |
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| Essay on Charles Frazier Biography » |
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| Essay on Jonathan Franzen Biography |
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| Jonathan Franzen Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, clearly one of the best-known novels of the early 21st century, won the National Book Award, and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, but it was his disdainful attitude about the book's selection for Oprah Winfrey's book club and his subsequent disinterest in popular TV shows that brought him worldwide attention, and, in fact, started a national debate about reading, book clubs, and popular culture. Although The Corrections has been praised for its realistic character depiction of dysfunctional family members, Franzen's description of himself as a "Midwestern Protestant with a Puritan streak" (quoted in Franzen... |
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| Essay on Jonathan Franzen Biography » |
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| Essay on Paula Fox Biography |
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| Paula Fox Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although best known for her prize-winning children's books, Paula Fox has written six adult novels. Desperate Characters (1970), depicting a middle-aged couple on the brink of divorce, and The Slave Dancer (1973), a controversial story of a New Orleans boy captured and imprisoned on an Africa-bound slave ship, are particularly celebrated. Paula Fox was born on April 22, 1923, in New York City to Paul Harvey and Elsie de Sola. Because her parents traveled a great deal, Fox lived with friends and relatives in New York state and Cuba. She married Richard Sigerson in 1948, divorced in 1954, and married Martin Greenberg in 1962. Since then she has worked as a full-time writer. In her first adult novel, Desperate... |
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| Essay on Hannah Webster Foster Biography |
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| Hannah Webster Foster Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Under the pseudonym "A Lady of Massachusetts," Hannah Webster Foster wrote a blockbuster entitled The Coquette (1797), a tale of seduction and betrayal that, along with Susannah Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794) and William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), became one of the three most popular works of the late 18th century. Although the novel is written in the epistolary style made popular by British novelist Samuel Richardson, Foster created a complex portrait of Elizabeth Wharton, the hero of the novel. Hannah Webster Foster was born on September 10, 1758, in Salisbury, Massachusetts, to Grant Webster, a Boston merchant, and Hannah Wainwright Webster. She was educated... |
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| Essay on Hannah Webster Foster Biography » |
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| Essay on Richard Ford Biography |
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| Richard Ford Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Since the publication of The Sportswriter (1986), readers and critics alike have held Richard Ford in high regard. As a "very personal, very introspective writer" (Jordan, 7), his reputation grew even larger after the publication of Independence Day (1995), the first novel ever to receive both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. (Michael Cunningham's The Hours received both honors in 1999). Sometimes labeled a minimalist in the tradition of Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, he has also been compared to Tobias Wolff and his "new" or "dirty" realism. Ford concentrates on working-class people in his native South, in Mexico and Montana, and particularly in New Jersey. His central... |
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| Essay on Richard Ford Biography » |
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| Essay on Shelby Foote Biography |
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| Shelby Foote Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Shelby Foote is known widely as the author of an acclaimed three-volume history: The Civil War: A Narrative (1958, 1963, 1974). His novels, Tournament (1949), Follow Me Down (1950), Love in a Dry Season (1951), Shiloh (1952), and September, September (1977), are all set in the Mississippi Delta and, with the exception of Shiloh, take place in Foote's fictional town of Bristol in Jordan County. In this sense Bristol is similar to William Faulkner's mythical town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County, or Eudora Welty's Morgana, Mississippi. Foote also uses Memphis as a locale in his fiction; he lived there since 1953. He writes often about loneliness and the failure of love. His pointedly fallible... |
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| Essay on Shelby Foote Biography » |
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| Essay on Thomas Flanagan Biography |
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| Thomas Flanagan Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Best known for his historical novels about Ireland, Thomas Flanagan was a novelist and short-story writer who received the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Year of the French (1979), a dramatization of the 1798 Irish rebellion against the British. Flanagan was praised for his ability to transport the reader into the past and for his use of a multiplicity of styles. Critic Denis Donoghue, in a review of The Year of the French, notes that Flanagan examines "conflicts of class, religion, tradition, and self-interest"; he also praises Flanagan's "knowledge of Irish history, mythology, religion, [and] local customs" (Donoghue, 22, 23). Thomas Flanagan was born on November 5, 1923, in Greenwich... |
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| Essay on Thomas Flanagan Biography » |
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| Essay on Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Biography |
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| Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, a belle of the ball, was born on July 24, 1900, in Montgomery, Alabama, to Anthony Dickinson Sayre, a legislator and judge, and Minnie Buckler Machen Sayre. She was a popular beauty who enjoyed a privileged life, but like many similar women of her era, she had no formal education past her graduation from Sidney Lanier High School in 1918. She met F. Scott Fitzgerald that same year, married him in New York City on April 3, 1920, and lived with him in both the United States and Europe. As Nancy Milford, her first biographer, characterized her, she was "the American girl living the American Dream, and she became mad within it" (Milford, xiv). From the late 1920s onward... |
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| Essay on Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Biography » |
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| Essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography |
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| F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald remains one of the major novelists of the 20th century, an author with the ability both to evoke an era and create an instantly recognizable vision of America, past or present. Nearly a century after the publication of his novels and stories chronicling the rootlessness and dissipation of what Gertrude Stein called "the lost generation," one that survived World War I with misplaced values, The Great Gatsby (1925), his masterpiece, remains an international as well as an American classic. In 2003, the British public voted it one of their "nation's best-loved novels." Numerous readers and some critics in both countries consider Tender Is the Night (1934), his expatriate novel... |
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| Essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography » |
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| Essay on Dorothy Canfield Fisher Biography |
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| Dorothy Canfield Fisher Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. In addition to writing 11 novels, several short-story collections, and 12 books of nonfiction, Dorothy Canfield Fisher was a cultural pace-setter, a committed social activist, and a literary tastemaker for a quarter of a century. She helped introduce the Montessori method of education to the United States and judged selections for the Book-of-the-Month Club for many years. One of her novels, The Home-Maker (1924), a best-seller, was made into a silent film of the same title in 1925. Her novels examine the vicissitudes of war, marriage, racism--particularly anti-Semitism, and gender roles. As scholar Elizabeth Wright notes, despite the fact that Eleanor Roosevelt... |
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| Essay on Dorothy Canfield Fisher Biography » |
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| Essay on Fanny Fern Biography |
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| Fanny Fern Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Fanny Fern, one of the most popular writers of her day, and one of the most outrageous, coined the phrase, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach." She wrote newspaper columns, primarily for the New York Ledger, essays collected in six volumes, three novels, and a novella. Her best-selling, largely autobiographical, novel, Ruth Hall (1855), threatened a considerable segment of the reading public because it clearly demonstrated the need for women's financial independence. Her other novels include Rose Clark (1856) and Fresh Leaves (1857). The novella Fanny Ford appeared serially in the Ledger in 1855. Although barely remembered during most of the last century, 21st-century readers view her... |
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| Essay on Fanny Fern Biography » |
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| Essay on Edna Ferber Biography |
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| Edna Ferber Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Edna Ferber, author of the best-selling Show Boat (1926) and Giant (1952), was, for more than three decades, one of America's most famous authors. Show Boat, made into a musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein and translated to film in two versions (1936, starring Irene Dunne; 1951, starring Katherine Grayson), is an American classic--although considered then, and now, to be a popular rather than literary novel. Most of her novels deal with some aspect of the American dream as the nation changed from a rural economy and milieu often marked by poverty (particularly in the South), racial oppression, and social caste, to the equally wicked ways of New York and Chicago. Ferber examined, too, the... |
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| Essay on Edna Ferber Biography » |
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| Essay on Jessie Redmon Fauset Biography |
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| Jessie Redmon Fauset Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote four novels, as well as poems, short stories, and essays, and was editor of the influential magazine Crisis from 1919-26, giving her an important role in the Harlem Renaissance. Her subject matter was unique for her era, in that her fiction was peopled by young, middle-class African-American women, rather than the exotic and uninhibited primitives that white readers had come to expect. Many of her characters had light skin, enabling them to "pass" as white, and thereby giving Fauset a springboard to examine racism and prejudice against both blacks and whites. She discussed miscegenation, and the nature of respectability, success, and individual happiness. Most frequently... |
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| Essay on Jessie Redmon Fauset Biography » |
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| Essay on James T. Farrell Biography |
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| James T. Farrell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Famously associated with his fictional characters Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill, Farrell was one of the first significant novelists to depict in detail both ethnic characters, usually working-class Irish Catholics, and urban life. With the exception of the Bernard Clare cycle, Farrell's novels are set in Chicago. Although Farrell is associated with literary naturalism and left-wing politics and often considered to be didactic, he believed firmly in producing literature for the "assimilation and presentation of life, not the tracking down of social and cultural movements to their economic source" (Glickberg, 427-428). Although Farrell is most often considered a "writer of the 1930s," he wrote... |
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| Essay on James T. Farrell Biography » |
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| Essay on Jeffrey Eugenides Biography |
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| Jeffrey Eugenides Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of two novels, both of which received laudatory reviews and awards: The Virgin Suicides (1993), excerpted in the Paris Review, won an Aga Khan Prize in 1991, and Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Eugenides, intrigued with the erotic and sometimes destructive powers of sex, limits the scope of both his novels to adolescence, which for many people is a time of pain, bewilderment, and angst. Most critics take special note of his poetic style, often combined with a dreamlike tone accented by the author's sense of humor. Jeffrey Eugenides was born in 1960 in Grosse Point Park, Michigan, to Constantine Eugenides, a mortgage banker, and Wanda Eugenides. He earned... |
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| Essay on Jeffrey Eugenides Biography » |
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| Essay on Louise Erdrich Biography |
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| Louise Erdrich Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Louise Erdrich has achieved enormous success. She is credited by numerous Native Americans as the author who made their stories known to a larger public. By telling stories of life, both on and off the reservation, in the unadorned style that has become her trademark, Erdrich satisfies the requirements of history and of the individual voice. Typically, Erdrich narrates her stories through many voices, all of which relate events in a nonchronological way. She is frequently compared to William Faulkner for the ways she structures narrative, and because she too creates a fictional town (Argus, North Dakota), a terrain both mythical and geographic. Erdrich has populated her "wild reservation brushland"... |
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| Essay on Louise Erdrich Biography » |
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| Essay on Ralph Waldo Ellison Biography |
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| Ralph Waldo Ellison Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Contemporary American literature scholars contend that no author other than Ralph Ellison has left such an enduring mark on literature with only one novel: when the 38-year-old Ellison published Invisible Man in 1952, a classic was born. For that novel he won the National Book Award. Twenty years after publication, Invisible Man was judged "the most distinguished work" published since the end of World War II, and 50 years later it was listed among the 100 best of Modern Library's 20th-century novels. It remains an integral part of American literature courses and continues to stimulate new readers and new scholarship. Ellison also wrote short stories, essays, and reviews, but he did not publish... |
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| Essay on Ralph Waldo Ellison Biography » |
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| Essay on Stanley Elkin Biography |
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| Stanley Elkin Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Stanley Elkin's unconventional writings--10 novels, two novellas, three story collections, and one essay collection--focus on the ordinary individual who feels unlucky and second-rate and therefore lacks dignity. Postmodern and postexistentialist in conception, his painstakingly crafted novels are absurdist in the extreme and often hilarious as well. His novels typically feature orphaned and dissatisfied male protagonists who, sometimes obsessively, seek understanding of both the frailties and the possibilities inherent in their personalities; they spend a good deal of time contemplating death. Elkin's admirers praise his verbal pyrotechnics and the vitality of his prose. Although... |
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| Essay on Stanley Elkin Biography » |
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| Essay on Walter D. Edmonds Biography |
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| Walter D. Edmonds Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Walter D. Edmonds wrote historical novels almost exclusively about the central New York, Erie Canal, and Mohawk Valley region where he was reared. His best-selling novel, Drums Along the Mohawk (1936), a tale of the violent struggle between the American Revolutionary War rebels and the British Tories (often supported by Native American allies) was made into the now classic 1939 film directed by John Ford. Author of more than 20 novels, 60 short stories, and three histories, Edmonds has been widely praised for his realistic and vivid depictions of the people and topography of his region, and for his historical chronicle of several generations of the pioneers and settlers of New York state... |
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| Essay on Walter D. Edmonds Biography » |
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| Essay on Clyde Edgerton Biography |
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| Clyde Edgerton Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of seven novels, Clyde Edgerton, a North Carolina writer, evokes the particularities of the South while endowing those details with universal appeal. His characters wrestle with the problems of love, connection, family, community, culture, morality, and history; the subjects of his novels range from married life, racial issues, storytelling, and religious hypocrisy, to the Vietnam War and 19th-century Colorado Indian cliff dwellings. He has been praised often for his fine storytelling abilities and his sense of humor and has a large following among readers in the American South. Clyde Edgerton was born on May 20, 1944, in Durham, North Carolina, to Ernest Edgerton, an insurance salesman... |
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| Essay on Clyde Edgerton Biography » |
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| Essay on William Eastlake Biography |
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| William Eastlake Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. William Eastlake wrote four novels about the Navajos of New Mexico and the southwestern United States, where he made his home for more than four decades. Characteristic of these early novels is the concept of time as viewed by Native Americans; this concept links together nature, humanity, death, and art. He also wrote three war novels, about the Revolutionary War (The Long Naked Descent into Boston [1977]), World War II (Castle Keep [1965]), and the Vietnam War (The Bamboo Bed [1969]); there he combines fragments of grimness, absurdity, satire, and parody with black humor, and this combination has won him an admiring following of readers. William Eastlake was born on July 14, 1917, in New York City... |
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| Essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar Biography |
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| Paul Laurence Dunbar Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Paul Laurence Dunbar, son of former slaves, died of tuberculosis at 34, having earned impressive accolades for his four novels, four collections of short stories, and six volumes of poetry. A number of critics have credited Dunbar, along with James Weldon Johnson, with pioneering the African-American novel. Although some contemporary readers may be disturbed by his sentimentalized views of antebellum plantation life, others will see the social protest in his novels, essays, and in some of his stories. His last novel, The Sport of the Gods (1902), the story of a black family that flees the South because of a white family's oppression, is generally viewed as his major fictional achievement... |
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| Essay on Paul Laurence Dunbar Biography » |
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| Essay on Andre Dubus III Biography |
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| Andre Dubus III Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. House Of Sand And Fog (1999), Andre Dubus's best-selling novel, was a finalist for five awards, including the National Book Award and inclusion on the Los Angeles Times notable novels list. Dubus, the son of celebrated short-fiction writer Andre Dubus, has also written one collection, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories (1989), and an earlier novel, Bluesman (1993). Andre Dubus III was born on September 11, 1959, in Oceanside, California, to Andre Dubus, writer and teacher, and Patricia Lowe Dubus, a social worker. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1981. After trying bartending and prison counseling, Dubus chose to be a writer and teacher, echoing his father's... |
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| Essay on Andre Dubus III Biography » |
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| Essay on Andre Dubus Biography |
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| Andre Dubus Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Hailed by many critics as one of the most significant writers of the late 20th century, Andre Dubus is best known as a short-story writer. Nearly every collection, however, contains at least one novella, a form he preferred, although his first publication was a novel entitled The Lieutenant (1967). Critics call Voices from the Moon (1984) both a novel and a novella, and one, Steve Yarborough, uses the term "compressed novels" to describe Dubus's work. Where ideas are concerned, Dubus is compared often with Ernest Hemingway, with whom he shares a focus on failed relationships between friends and/or spouses, and the inability of women and men to understand each other... |
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| Essay on Andre Dubus Biography » |
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| Essay on Theodore Dreiser Biography |
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| Theodore Dreiser Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Generally acknowledged as the most significant American practitioner of naturalism in the last century, Theodore Dreiser wrote eight novels as well as short stories, plays, and poetry. His name is synonymous with two classic American tales, An American Tragedy (1925) and Sister Carrie (1900). Dreiser's reputation has remained remarkably consistent over the last several decades, suggesting that his insights into the American psyche remain accurate as well as eloquent. His dark view of American possibility and potential ran counter to the optimism of other writers; influenced by Herbert Spencer's philosophy that human free will counted for little, and later by Freud and his belief in the dominance... |
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| Essay on Theodore Dreiser Biography » |
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| Essay on John Dos Passos Biography |
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| John Dos Passos Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the foremost writers of the 1920s and 1930s, John Dos Passos--novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist--earned his reputation by analyzing what he saw as the failure of the American dream. He published the antiwar novel One Man's Initiation--1917 in 1920, followed by Three Soldiers in 1921. With the strikingly original Manhattan Transfer (1925), however, he became linked with the leading modernist writers of his day. At that time sympathetic to the working class, Dos Passos contrived new ways of expressing the promises and failures of capitalism, culminating in his three-volume U.S.A. Trilogy. Using a montage of techniques, including the kaleidoscope of initially unrelated scenes... |
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| Essay on John Dos Passos Biography » |
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| Essay on Michael Dorris Biography |
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| Michael Dorris Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Founder of the Native American Studies Department at Dartmouth College and collaborator, with his wife, the writer Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris was a respected novelist, essayist, short-fiction writer, and memoirist before his suicide in 1997. Author of 14 books and more than 100 articles, he is best known for his first novel, A Yellow Raft In Blue Water (1987), and for A Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (1989), his nonfiction account of his adopted son's struggle with that disorder. This memoir brought the syndrome to national attention; it won the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award, and was produced for television in 1992 by Universal Television... |
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| Essay on Michael Dorris Biography » |
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| Essay on J. P. Donleavy Biography |
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| J. P. Donleavy Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. An American expatriate author who wrote his most famous novel, The Ginger Man, in 1955, J. P. Donleavy was further honored when this novel was included in the Scribner Top 100 Books of the Twentieth Century. Virtually all 14 of his novels, along with a large number of plays and essays and a collection of short fiction--derive from the English picaresque tradition with its comic and often bawdy overtones. Donleavy's work features rebellious protagonists madly fleeing conventionality and leading lustful, amusing lives that are, ultimately, lonely and marginalized. J. P. Donleavy was born on April 23, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, to James Patrick Donleavy and Margaret Donleavy, both Irish... |
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| Essay on J. P. Donleavy Biography » |
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| Essay on Ivan Doig Biography |
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| Ivan Doig Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Ivan Doig, the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, received a National Book Award nomination and a Christopher Award for his memoir, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind in 1979. All of Doig's novels are either set in his native Montana or feature a Montana character. He is often compared with and viewed as the successor to Wallace Stegner not only in his evocation of region but in his concern for the American land and its wildernesses. In creating an area called "Two Medicine" (or "Scotch Heaven") he earns comparisons with William Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha country. Ivan Doig was born on June 27, 1939, in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, to Charles Campbell Doig... |
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| Essay on Ivan Doig Biography » |
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| Essay on Harriet Doerr Biography |
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| Harriet Doerr Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Harriet Doerr wrote her first novel, Stones for Ibarra (1984), at the age of 73; it won the 1984 American Book Award and the 1985 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award. Her second novel, Consider This, Senora (1993), was another commercial and critical success. In both novels, the swift passing of time looms large, as does the central significance of wisdom and memory. Doerr also published Under an Aztec Sun (1990), a short story collection, and Tiger in the Grass: Stories and Other Inventions (1995), a story and essay collection. Born in Pasadena, California, in 1910, Doerr was the granddaughter of Henry Edwards Huntington, the railroad magnate whose estate now includes... |
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| Essay on Harriet Doerr Biography » |
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| Essay on E. L. Doctorow Biography |
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| E. L. Doctorow Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. An award-winning playwright and short-story and essay writer, E. L. Doctorow is best known for his novels, particularly the popular and critically acclaimed Ragtime (1975). Winner of awards from the National Book Critics Circle and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ragtime was made into a feature-length film in 1981, as was Welcome to Hard Times (1960) in 1967 and The Book of Daniel (1971) in 1983. Each of Doctorow's novels portrays a different historical era; he mixes historical fact with fiction and uses invented characters in encounters with historical figures like the Archduke Ferdinand, J. P. Morgan, or Josephine Baker. Because he includes song lyrics, newspaper excerpts... |
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| Essay on E. L. Doctorow Biography » |
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| Essay on Stephen Dixon Biography |
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| Stephen Dixon Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Stephen Dixon, an innovative postmodernist, primarily known for more than 400 short stories, has also written nine novels, including the National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner finalist, Frog (1991). Interstate (1995), also a National Book Award finalist, received plaudits for its tensely original portrayal of a family chased and shot at on an interstate highway. Many of Dixon's novels are set in New York City and are concerned with the intersection of the bizarre and the domestic in the lives of ordinary individuals. Although he is often praised for his realistic depictions of post-World War II American life, Dixon is frequently compared to experimental writers like the Czechoslovakian novelist Franz Kafka... |
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| Essay on Stephen Dixon Biography » |
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| Essay on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Biography |
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| Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Drawing on her experiences as an immigrant and a woman, Divakaruni has stated that her expatriate status actually contributed to her desire to write (Moka-Dias, 87). Beginning with her prize-winning short stories, Divakaruni addressed such issues as racism, mixed marriages, divorce, poverty, and abortion. In The Mistress of Spices, her first novel, Tito, the mistress of spices, who runs a spice shop in Oakland, California, helps the women who come to her cope with domestic abuse, drug problems, and intergenerational as well as marital conflict. In Sister of My Heart, her second novel, Divakaruni illustrates and examines the conflicts between traditional Indian mothers and Westernized... |
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| Essay on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Biography » |
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| Essay on Pietro di Donato Biography |
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| Pietro di Donato Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Pietro di Donato--novelist, playwright, and short-story writer--was the author of the acclaimed autobiographical novel, Christ in Concrete (1937), now considered a classic American novel. It is the fictionalized account of the way di Donato, son of an immigrant bricklayer killed in a construction accident, grew up while taking responsibility for his mother and seven siblings. Pietro di Donato was born on April 3, 1911, in West Hoboken, New Jersey, to Geremio di Donato and Annunziata Chinquina di Donato, both from Abruzzi, Italy. When di Donato was 12 years old, his father was crushed beneath a faultily constructed building. To support the family, di Donato quickly excelled in his father's trade... |
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| Essay on Pietro di Donato Biography » |
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| Essay on Joan Didion Biography |
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| Joan Didion Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Equally well known for fiction and nonfiction, and for creating complex female characters, Joan Didion is the author of five novels. Her second, Play It as It Lays, was nominated for the 1971 National Book Award, and her fourth, Democracy, received a 1984 Los Angeles Times Book Award nomination. Didion is admired for her ability to portray the trends, foibles, and idiosyncrasies of modern life. Her richly economical and precise style is widely respected, as is her technique of depicting a family as a microcosm of the state of California, which then becomes a microcosm of the state of the United States. Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, to Frank Reese Didion... |
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| Essay on Joan Didion Biography » |
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| Essay on James Dickey Biography |
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| James Dickey Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. James Dickey won the National Book Award in 1966 when he was the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. He published his first novel, Deliverance, in 1970. The novel was a popular success, and Dickey wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Deliverance in 1982. According to scholars Richard J. Calhoun and Robert W. Hill, the thematic concerns of Dickey's novels echo those of his poetry: war, nature, love, family, and a transcendence from the mundane and the commonplace. Most critics feel, in fact, that stylistically, too, Dickey's novels are an extension of his poetry. Dickey wrote two other novels, Alnilam (1987) and To the White Sea (1993) while continuing to write poetry... |
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| Essay on James Dickey Biography » |
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| Essay on Philip K. Dick Biography |
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| Philip K. Dick Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A prolific writer of both novels and short stories, Philip K. Dick is famous without and within the world of science fiction. His vision is dark, frequently despairing and even paranoid, yet alleviated by elements of black comedy. His best-known novels include The Man in the High Castle (1962), winner of the 1963 World Science Fiction Society Hugo award; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and Valis (1981). The cult film noir, Blade Runner, loosely based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) made Dick's novel famous as well. Although a central theme is the clash between multiple realities, his admirers believe... |
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| Essay on Philip K. Dick Biography » |
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| Essay on Anita Diamant Biography |
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| Anita Diamant Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Anita Diamant burst onto the literary scene with the publication of her first novel (and seventh book), The Red Tent, in 1998. The book, which takes the story of the Biblical Jacob and refocuses it on Dinah, his daughter, and on his four wives, was an immediate success. There are considerably more than a million copies in print. Part of her success, Diamant has pointed out in a recent interview, is that both The Red Tent and her next novel, The Good Harbor (2001), "tell 'untold' or perhaps 'undertold' stories about the heart of women's experiences," (author biography). Anita Diamant was born on June 27, 1951, in Newark, New Jersey, to Maurice Diamant, a Linotype operator and newspaper proofreader... |
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| Essay on Anita Diamant Biography » |
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| Essay on Pete Dexter Biography |
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| Pete Dexter Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Pete Dexter, novelist and journalist, has written six novels to date. His third, Paris Trout (1988), won the National Book Award, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was adapted as a cable television film starring Dennis Hopper, Barbara Hershey, and Ed Harris. Dexter has become known for his artful contributions to noir fiction and for his ability to write film scripts that are similarly grim. Pete Dexter was born in 1943, in Potomac, Michigan. Reared in Georgia and South Dakota, he earned his bachelor's degree from the University of South Dakota in 1970. While working as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, Dexter was nearly beaten to death in a barroom fight by people... |
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| Essay on Pete Dexter Biography » |
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| Essay on Peter De Vries Biography |
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| Peter De Vries Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Peter De Vries was the prolific author of 24 novels and scores of short stories, many of which were published in the New Yorker--of which he was poetry editor--and all of which demonstrate De Vries's inimitable blend of humor, satire, wit, punning, and parody. Most of his novels target sexual mores or religion (Into Your Tent I'll Creep [1971] and The Blood of the Lamb [1962], for instance), with a few aimed at parodying famous writers or the writing process (The Tents of Wickedness [1959]). His widely read novels have received very positive critical reviews; critics were quick to point out that his novels exposed the moral, cultural, and social foibles of late 20th-century America. Peter De Vries... |
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| Essay on Peter De Vries Biography » |
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| Essay on Nelson DeMille Biography |
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| Nelson DeMille Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. With more than 30 million books in print, Nelson DeMille is an immensely popular novelist who creates authentic and intriguing characters and saturates his detective and mystery fiction with action and romance. As a stylist, DeMille brings both elegance and wit to these genres. Early in his career, he wrote a series of police novels set in the seamier neighborhoods of New York City. These novels, starring police sergeant Joe Ryker, were reissued in the early 1990s. For more than two decades DeMille's thrillers have been translated into at least 20 languages; they take place, as we would expect, in settings as varied as Vietnam, Babylon, Russia, Long Island, Georgia, and Ohio. Nelson DeMille was born on... |
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| Essay on Nelson DeMille Biography » |
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| Essay on Floyd Dell Biography |
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| Floyd Dell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A novelist, journalist, playwright and editor, Floyd Dell was a prominent writer associated with the Chicago Renaissance, the artistic elites of the Jazz Age Greenwich Village, and the Works Project Administration (WPA) in Washington, D.C. Dell joined the Socialist Party when he was 16 years old, and wrote his first and most admired novel, Moon-Calf, in 1920. This novel spoke for his generation much as did F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby; indeed, Dell is sometimes referred to as the "Scott Fitzgerald of Illinois." Unlike Fitzgerald, however, Dell's concern was with the lives of ordinary working people. He was also an ardent supporter of women's causes and wrote both nonfiction and fiction... |
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| Essay on Floyd Dell Biography » |
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| Essay on Don DeLillo Biography |
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| Don DeLillo Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Don DeLillo, along with John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, has helped define postmodernism with his critically acclaimed experimental novels. Although his earlier novels were appreciated more by critics than by general readers, his more recent work, particularly White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), and Underworld (1997) has gained more popularity. He is frequently praised for his portrait of contemporary society, one with misleading surfaces and dark undertones. The darkness seems to suggest inhuman technology, materialism, loneliness, dislocation, and disjunction. DeLillo's distinguished career has earned him the PEN/Faulkner Award... |
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| Essay on Don DeLillo Biography » |
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| Essay on Samuel R. Delany Biography |
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| Samuel R. Delany Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Winner of 10 Nebula awards, 10 Hugo awards, and two Lambda Awards (for gay and lesbian fiction), Samuel Delany is one of the premier writers of science fiction. He is credited with opening up the genre to African Americans, and with expanding the limitations of the genre through radical experimentation with plot, structure, sexual thematics, and linguistic innovation. He is best known for his novel Dahlgren (1975), the critically successful Babel-17, and his Neveryon series. One of the few African Americans to succeed in the genre, Delany has written more than three dozen volumes of fiction and nonfiction and has received popular as well as critical acclaim. Universities have also recognized... |
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| Essay on Samuel R. Delany Biography » |
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| Essay on Richard Harding Davis Biography |
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| Richard Harding Davis Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist, fin-de-siecle war correspondent, and pioneering mystery and sports writer, Richard Harding Davis, known as the glamour boy, the American [Rudyard] Kipling, the Beau Brummel of the Press, lived a life of adventure and influence that his fictional creations might have envied: He covered wars in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America; became a model for artist Charles Dana Gibson, who created the Gibson Girl and illustrated numerous books by Davis; worked as the editor of Harper's Weekly and helped shape the modern American magazine; created the chivalrous and sophisticated hero Courtland Van Bibber; and, through his use of spies, intrigue, and adventure, anticipated the fiction... |
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| Essay on Richard Harding Davis Biography » |
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| Essay on Rebecca Harding Davis Biography |
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| Rebecca Harding Davis Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. With the anonymous publication of her Life In The Iron Mills, or the Korl Woman (1861) in the Atlantic Monthly, Rebecca Harding moved onto the American literary scene as a new interpreter of realism and naturalism; she focused on the starved and brutal conditions of factory and mill workers, who, like the korl (the refuse of the iron-mill), were a by-product of mid-19th century industrialization in America. When James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, asked her for more fiction, she responded with Margaret Howth: A Story of To-Day (1862), another bleak and withering look at the conditions of overworked and underfed ironworkers. Although she wrote 10 novels, more than 100 short stories... |
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| Essay on Rebecca Harding Davis Biography » |
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| Essay on H. L. Davis Biography |
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| H. L. Davis Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although his poetry was admired by Carl Sandburg and Robinson Jeffers, H. L. Davis is best known today for his five novels. They address the myths and psychological underpinnings of the American West during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although Davis published stories and poetry in American Mercury, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and Poetry, H. L. Mencken, editor of American Mercury, encouraged him to move from poetry to fiction, and H. L. Davis won the Pulitzer Prize and the Harper Prize for his first novel, Honey in the Horn (1935). His other novels include Harp of a Thousand Strings (1947), Beulah Land (1949), Winds of Morning (1952)--considered by some critics to be his best...
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| Essay on Edwidge Danticat Biography |
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| Edwidge Danticat Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Literature. A significant new American writer with several critically acclaimed novels set in Haiti and Brooklyn, New York, Edwidge Danticat (pronounced Dahn-ti-kah) is the Haitian-born author of Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), an Oprah Book Club selection, and The Farming of Bones (1998), an American Book Award winner. She has also written two collections of short stories, Krik? Krak! (1995), a National Book Award finalist, and The Dew Breaker (2004); Granta named her as one of the "Best of American Novelists" in 1996. Danticat is praised often for the rich lyricism of her prose that offsets her violent subject matter, and for her ability to describe being "young, black, Haitian and female and wandering... |
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| Essay on Edwidge Danticat Biography » |
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| Essay on Kelly Cherry Biography |
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| Kelly Cherry Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. An award-winning poet with a distinguished career as both writer and professor, Kelly Cherry is also a prose fiction writer whose novels and short stories have been critically acclaimed. She has written six novels that, according to one critic, are superior to her poetry, and her work has been translated into 10 languages. Although her work addresses contemporary moral issues, and romantic and marital relationships, Cherry is a writer who infuses her work with humor to relieve the often bleak landscape she describes. Many of her protagonists are women, and most of her settings include the university campuses where her characters work and the towns that house them. Kelly Cherry was born in 1940... |
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| Essay on Kelly Cherry Biography » |
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| Essay on John Cheever Biography |
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| John Cheever Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Initially viewed by a number of critics and readers as a glib yet prolific writer of New Yorker short stories, John Cheever gradually achieved a solid reputation as a serious novelist with a complex moral vision (Time magazine called him "Ovid in Ossining" in 1964). His first two novels, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and The Wapshot Scandal (1964), tell the story of a patrician New England family that peaks and declines in a way similar to Cheever's own ancestors. Bullet Park (1969) is the critically well-received examination of the dark center of American suburbia, and Falconer (1977), possibly his most admired novel, explores fraternal relationships, murder, prison, and homosexuality... |
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| Essay on John Cheever Biography » |
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| Essay on Denise Chavez Biography |
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| Denise Chavez Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Denise Chavez occupies a prominent place in contemporary Chicana fiction. Although admired as a prolific playwright, she is well known for her first novel, The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), and for Face of an Angel, winner of the 1994 National Book Award. According to Chicano novelist Rudolfo Anaya, Chavez is "an outstanding Chicana novelist" because of "her ability to reveal the inner and often chaotic lives of her characters" (quoted in Review of Loving Pedro Infante, 88). It is with women that all Chavez's fiction is primarily concerned: from mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and antepasados (ancestors), to shop-girls, waitresses, and maids. As many critics have observed, her work is unified by realistic... |
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| Essay on Denise Chavez Biography » |
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| Essay on Joan Chase Biography |
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| Joan Chase Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Her output is small--two novels and one short-story collection--but Joan Chase has been hailed as an exceptional writer whose lucid style, accurate dialogue, and incisive character portrayals have gained her widespread respect and admiration. Her first novel, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983) won the Hemingway Foundation Award from the PEN American Center. Her second, The Evening Wolves (1989), also won praise from reviewers. Information about Joan Chase's personal life is scarce. She was born in Monroeville, Alabama, educated at the University of Maryland and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree; from time to time she has taught university-level writing courses... |
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| Essay on Joan Chase Biography » |
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| Essay on Fred Chappell Biography |
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| Fred Chappell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Fred Chappell, poet and novelist, usually places his novels in the North Carolina Appalachian region where he was reared. Much admired for his storytelling abilities, Chappell is nonetheless a southern writer whose emphasis on the darker and more violent aspects of life reminds contemporary readers of the gothic tales of William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. His characters are (or are involved with) murderers, nymphomaniacs, sadists, and alcoholics, yet Chappell also points out that memory and nostalgia are healing properties; he builds bridges between contentious agrarian and urban environments, and his novels are for the most part built on a foundation of intricately... |
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| Essay on Fred Chappell Biography » |
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| Essay on Raymond Chandler Biography |
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| Raymond Chandler Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Raymond Chandler created one of the most enduring protagonists in American fiction: Philip Marlowe, his laconic loner, the star of his hard-boiled detective fiction. Since Chandler's death, scholars and critics have studied his work seriously, with many labeling him a modernist, along with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. University courses in late-20th-century literature routinely include his novels, particularly The Big Sleep (1939). The screenplay for that novel, which Chandler admired, was written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman. In his famous essay, "The Simple Art of Murder" (1950), Chandler acknowledged the influence of his predecessor Dashiell Hammett... |
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| Essay on Raymond Chandler Biography » |
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| Essay on Michael Chabon Biography |
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| Michael Chabon Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Acclaimed by many critics as one of the most gifted writers of recent times, Michael Chabon won several awards--including the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a National Book Award nomination--for his novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), also nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Chabon is praised repeatedly for evoking the tragicomic years of adolescence, complete with sexual longing and disappointment. Michael Chabon was born on May 24, 1963, in Washington, D.C., to Robert Chabon, a lawyer, hospital manager, and physician, and Sharon Chabon, a lawyer. He was reared in nearby Columbia, Maryland, where he and his mother moved after his parents... |
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| Essay on Michael Chabon Biography » |
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| Essay on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Biography |
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| Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha wrote a poetic and postmodern fictional autobiography or novel--the postmodern use of multiple genres make the book difficult to categorize--about the experience of exile, the suffering of women, and the ways in which they transcend both experiences. In Dictee (1982), the writer allows the reader to suffer and struggle with Cha, also one of the characters in the novel, as she meets the challenge of learning another language. Her major theme is immigration and its disjunctive and fragmenting effects. As Gilbey and Lin point out, the book, which tells the stories of several women--Ya Guan Soon, a Korean revolutionary; Demeter and Persephone; Cha's mother; Joan of Arc... |
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| Essay on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Biography » |
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| Essay on Willa Cather Biography |
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| Willa Cather Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the major American novelists and short-story writers of the 20th century, Willa Cather is recognized today not only for her celebration of the vast beauty of the American landscape, but also for her exploration of the darker forces underlying the myths of American life. Always optimistic, Cather depicts immigrants and pioneers who displayed the qualities of courage, perseverance, and a sensitivity to natural beauty, no matter how difficult the circumstances of their lives. Her many awards include the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), the Howells Medal from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and the Gold Medal of the National... |
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| Essay on Willa Cather Biography » |
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| Essay on John Casey Biography |
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| John Casey Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Casey, novelist and short-story writer, first attracted critical attention with An American Romance (1977), an academic satire and love story, but it was his second novel, Spartina (1989) that earned the most acclaim and a National Book Award. There and in subsequent novels, noted the critics, Casey created characters who are so distinctively depicted that they seem virtually to enter the reader's life. His novels often portray broken marriages and death, but his work is saved from bitterness and despair through Casey's use of humor and satire. John Casey was born on January 18, 1939, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Joseph Edward Casey, an attorney, and Constance Dudley Casey... |
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| Essay on John Casey Biography » |
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| Essay on Truman Capote Biography |
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| Truman Capote Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Like Carson McCullers, another 20th-century southern genius who published her first novel in her early 20s, Truman Capote published his first novel at age 24. Like McCullers, he, too, left his native South for New York City, loving the sound of the pavement under his feet (Reed, 16), but nonetheless using the South as material for his early stories and novels (Other Voices, Other Rooms [1948] and The Grass Harp [1951]). Holly Golightly, the protagonist of Capote's New York novel, Breakfast At Tiffany's (1958), is a southern transplant. Capote, in fact, does not leave the South in his fiction until he enters Kansas, the setting of In Cold Blood (1965). Readers are still attracted to Capote's lyrical... |
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| Essay on Truman Capote Biography » |
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| Essay on Ethan Canin Biography |
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| Ethan Canin Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Ethan Canin began his career as one of the youngest members of a new generation of writers. He published his first short story when he was 19 years old; like Walker Percy and Michael Crichton before him, Canin entered the medical profession before realizing that he might have a successful career as a writer. After the success of his story collection Emperor of Air (1988), Canin published his first novel, Blue River, in 1991. He has been influenced by such surprisingly different writers as John Cheever and Danielle Steele, who taught him in a private high school. His predilection for exploring family tensions and rivalries in three forms--the short story, the novella, and the novel--has been praised for... |
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| Essay on Ethan Canin Biography » |
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| Essay on Bebe Moore Campbell Biography |
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| Bebe Moore Campbell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Bebe Moore Campbell is the author of four acclaimed novels, more than 100 journal and magazine articles, and a popular memoir, Sweet Summer: Growing Up with and without My Dad (1989). Her novels focus directly on racial, class, and gender issues, and her first novel, Your Blues Ain't like Mine (1992), which won the NAACP Image Award for literature and appeared on the New York Times Notable Book list, was based on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Similarly Brothers and Sisters (1994) explores the tensions that led to the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and quickly appeared on the New York Times best-seller list; Singing in the Comeback Choir (1998), based on Campbell's life... |
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| Essay on Bebe Moore Campbell Biography » |
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| Essay on Peter Cameron Biography |
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| Peter Cameron Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Peter Cameron, the author of four novels and three story collections, was first published when he was 26 years old. He is considered a minimalist who explores upheavals from wrecked marriages to dysfunctional families in the lives of ordinary people and is compared often to Ann Beattle, Raymond Carver, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Several of his stories have won O. Henry prizes. Cameron was born in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, to Donald O. Cameron, an economist, and Sally Shaw Cameron. Reared in the environs of New York City and, for several years, in London, where he attended The American School, Cameron completed his education at Hamilton College, receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1982... |
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| Essay on Peter Cameron Biography » |
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| Essay on Hortense Calisher Biography |
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| Hortense Calisher Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of 14 novels, numerous novellas and short stories, and two memoirs, Hortense Calisher has been awarded a 1989 National Endowment for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, earned three National Book Award nominations and four O. Henry Awards. Her short fiction is more acclaimed than her novels, but in any case she is considered "a writer's writer." Calisher's novels are notable for their psychologically rich portrayals of characters from ordinary backgrounds; they can realize themselves as individuals by facing and then shedding their pasts. Often sorrowful or despairing, they grapple with demons and are usually optimistic by the novel's end. Hortense Calisher was born on... |
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| Essay on Hortense Calisher Biography » |
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| Essay on Erskine Caldwell Biography |
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| Erskine Caldwell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. At one time published in the pages of Scribner's magazine alongside Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell peaked, ebbed, nearly disappeared, and has now returned to the lists of writers of significant American novels. He remains controversial as we enter the 21st century, although his focus on the plight of the disadvantaged rural American, along with his distinctive gift of characterization and his ability to plot tales suspensefully, promises that today's readers will remain interested in this prolific writer. Caldwell's milieu was the South, and he has been compared to other southern writers like Ellen Glasgow and Faulkner. All of them are concerned with... |
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| Essay on Erskine Caldwell Biography » |
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| Essay on James M. Cain Biography |
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| James M. Cain Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A journalist as well as a novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and scriptwriter, James M. Cain was one of the most successful of the "hard-boiled" writers of crime novels. He is usually considered with the writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, inventors of the private eyes Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. While Cain did not write detective fiction, he did invent in his 17 novels and 16 stories the "tough guy" hero derived in style and scope from H. L. Mencken and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom had profound influence on Cain. This hero can be an aimless drifter or a bank executive, an ex-boxer or an industrial tycoon, but all, according to Cain scholar David Madden, are pushed, lured, or tempted... |
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| Essay on Abraham Cahan Biography |
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| Abraham Cahan Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Abraham Cahan, who experimented with every literary genre, is best known today as the celebrated author of two novels and editor of the first major Jewish newspaper, the Socialist Jewish Daily Forward, founded in 1917. (The Forward, published in Yiddish, united Jews from Europe and became the most significant articulator of Jewish identity as it evolved in New York City's Lower East Side.) In 1896 Cahan wrote Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, the first major novel of immigrant experience, and in 1917 published The Rise Of David Levinsky, the mythic story of a Jewish cloakmaker whose upward social mobility is accompanied by the inevitable gains, losses, and contradictions resulting from acculturation into American life... |
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| Essay on Abraham Cahan Biography » |
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| Essay on George Washington Cable Biography |
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| George Washington Cable Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Long admired as a 19th-century regionalist, George Washington Cable attracts contemporary readers because of his early understanding of and opposition to slaveholding. Author of nine novels about life in his native New Orleans, he is particularly noted for The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) and the novella Madame Delphine (1881). A realistic writer of novels and short stories (see Old Creole Days [1879]) whose vivid use of detail evokes the still-familiar images of Louisiana bayous, New Orleans balconies and iron grillwork, he wrote preemptively about the burden of southern guilt over slavery, and about the decaying southern gentry, miscegenation, and racial injustice... |
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| Essay on George Washington Cable Biography » |
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| Essay on James Branch Cabell Biography |
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| James Branch Cabell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. James Branch Cabell has not had the revival that other American writers have enjoyed, yet he was at the center of a cause celebre in the 1920s. (His novel Jurgen, published in 1919, was reviled as pornographic.) Cabell, one of the 1920s literati, wrote 20 novels, but as critics have observed, he remains the sort of writer who will irritate some readers and delight others. Both camps admire his style--comic and erotic--and his deep knowledge of myth and legend. Clearly, Cabell admired the chivalry of medieval times. He wrote a 20-volume autobiography, somewhat fictionalized, called The Biography of the Life of Manuel: The Works of James Branch Cabell, and scholars still believe it was his most significant work... |
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| Essay on James Branch Cabell Biography » |
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| Essay on Robert Olen Butler Biography |
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| Robert Olen Butler Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Robert Olen Butler was catapulted to national fame when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collected short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, published in 1992. Its subject is the Vietnam War experience, the major theme of five of Butler's 10 novels: The Alleys of Eden (1981), Sun Dogs (1982), On Distant Ground (1985), (considered a loosely linked Vietnam trilogy), The Deuce (1989), and The Deep Green Sea (1998). Unlike many earlier writers who wrote about combat in Vietnam, Butler writes from different points of view, including those of Vietnamese immigrants, and uses different settings, from Saigon to Alaska to New Orleans. Many critics have praised his writing for these affective... |
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| Essay on Robert Olen Butler Biography » |
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| Essay on Octavia Estelle Butler Biography |
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| Octavia Estelle Butler Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Octavia Butler, novelist and short-story writer, specialized in science fiction. The best-known African-American woman in the field, she brought to her fiction issues of race and gender not normally present in the genre. Butler did not, however, elevate politics over art: her characters are carefully crafted and admired for their believability. She wrote about genetic engineering, issues of power, and interplanetary aliens, but also addressed the more familiar conflicts in mother-daughter relationships. Butler is probably best known for her Patternmaster series of five novels that traces the domination of society by an elite group of telepathic individuals and for her fantasy novel Kindred... |
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| Essay on Octavia Estelle Butler Biography » |
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| Essay on Frederick Busch Biography |
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| Frederick Busch Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of 14 novels and six short-story collections, Frederick Busch has a reputation as a multifaceted writer of novels and short stories. His style, called "experimental realism" by a number of critics, is a blend of postmodernism with traditional fictional components that many contemporary novelists eschew: As scholar Donald J. Greiner points out, Busch is "very much at ease" with contemporary fictional inventions while at the same time he employs the "traditional staples" of the novel: character, plot, setting, and theme (Greiner, 1988, 3). Busch is known for his presentation of marital and family issues and his sensitivity to the perspectives of children, but he has also written fiction... |
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| Essay on Frederick Busch Biography » |
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| Essay on William S. Burroughs Biography |
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| William S. Burroughs Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Considered by admirers to be one of the most talented 20th-century American writers, William S. Burroughs lived the eclectic life mirrored in the drug subculture and homosexuality in two of his more notorious novels Junky (1977) and Naked Lunch (1959). Naked Lunch--its publication in the United States followed three years of court trials for obscenity--has also been called one of the most innovative and visionary novels produced by an American. Although Burroughs, who received a National Institute of Arts and Letters and American Academy award in literature in 1975, was one generation removed from the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he identified with their unconventionality... |
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| Essay on William S. Burroughs Biography » |
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| Essay on Edgar Rice Burroughs Biography |
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| Edgar Rice Burroughs Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of about 70 books, Edgar Rice Burroughs will forever be associated with the mythic Tarzan novels, one of the most popular series ever produced in the United States. These novels about an English lord's son who was raised by apes in the jungle, have sold more than 100 million copies in 30 languages. The 24 novels of the Tarzan series, however, represent roughly one-third of Burroughs's publications. There are also the Mars or Martian series, the Pellucidar series, and the Venus series, which most readers consider to be science fiction. Although the work of such a prolific writer is usually uneven, critics of the last two decades especially have increasingly paid attention to Burroughs... |
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| Essay on Edgar Rice Burroughs Biography » |
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| Essay on Carlos Bulosan Biography |
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| Carlos Bulosan Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Author of poetry, essays, short stories, and an autobiographical novel, Carlos Bulosan was a distinguished Filipino-American writer whose work has become a pillar of Asian-American studies courses and literature classes. America Is In The Heart (1946), once considered by critics to be more novel than autobiography, detailed the narrator's childhood in the Philippines and and his move to the United States. There he attempted to survive, despite virulent racism. Carlos Bulosan was born on either November 2 or November 24, in 1911, 1913, or 1914, in Binalonan, Pangasinan, the Philippines. After several years of secondary schooling, he sailed for Seattle, Washington, to join his older brother Aurelio... |
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| Essay on Carlos Bulosan Biography » |
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| Essay on Charles Bukowski Biography |
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| Charles Bukowski Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Charles Bukowski is the author of approximately 100 books, more than 40 of them volumes of poetry. Also a short-story writer and novelist, he remains a cult figure, the prolific and avant-garde chronicler of the impoverished and the dispossessed, especially those involved in copious amounts of sex, violence, and drugs. Some readers see him in the tradition of Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway, with a subtle moral subtext beneath the macho and misogynist characters and themes, and some find him blatantly sexist. His seven novels typically feature a semiautobiographical protagonist named Henry Chinaski; he appears in the poem sand short stories as well. Charles Bukowski was born on... |
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| Essay on Charles Bukowski Biography » |
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| Essay on Pearl S. Buck Biography |
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| Pearl S. Buck Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although her name is practically synonymous with her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Good Earth (1931), Pearl Buck, an internationally best-selling author, was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature (1938). She was also the author of more than 100 books, over 60 of them novels. She wrote plays, short stories, biographies, and numerous nonfiction essays and articles as well. After some decades of critical neglect, The Good Earth became an Oprah Book Club selection in 2004, nearly three-quarters of a century after it first appeared. The revival of interest in Buck's work was energized by the publication in 1996 of Peter J. Conn's Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography... |
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| Essay on Pearl S. Buck Biography » |
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| Essay on William Wells Brown Biography |
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| William Wells Brown Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A pivotal figure in African-American literary history, William Wells Brown wrote Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), the first African-American novel, as well as the first play, the first travel narrative, and Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847), that went through six editions in the United States and England. Clotel; or, The President's Daughter has assured Brown of a permanent place in history: Published only one year after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, this powerful social protest novel painted a more horrific picture of the realities of slavery than did Stowe's best-seller. William Wells Brown was born in slavery around 1816... |
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| Essay on William Wells Brown Biography » |
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| Essay on Rosellen Brown Biography |
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| Rosellen Brown Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Rosellen Brown, one of Ms. magazine's Women of the Year in 1984, received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in 1987. Of her five novels, three--Tender Mercies (1978), Before and After (1992), and Civil Wars (1984)--have been adapted into feature-length films. Also the author of three volumes of poetry and a short-story collection, Brown has been praised for her portrayals of racial issues, mother-daughter relationships, and for her evocations of our ties to family and community. Her "forte," says reviewer Rochelle Ratner, "is beginning her novels at the very moment when the family structure begins to fall apart, and picking up the action from that point" (Ratner, 31... |
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| Essay on Rita Mae Brown Biography |
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| Rita Mae Brown Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist, poet, feminist activist, screenwriter, and essayist, Rita Mae Brown came into prominence with her first novel, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), featuring a lesbian protagonist with a sense of humor. Although she has a reputation as a spokesperson for lesbians and Rubyfruit Jungle has become a staple, not just of gay and lesbian literature courses, but also of women's studies and contemporary American literature courses, Brown has strongly resisted the label of "lesbian writer." In addition to fiction set in various historical eras, from the present to the Great Depression to the Civil War and the aftermath of the War of 1812, Brown has devoted the last decade to writing mystery novels... |
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| Essay on Rita Mae Brown Biography » |
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| Essay on Dan Brown Biography |
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| Dan Brown Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Erstwhile schoolteacher turned blockbuster writer, Dan Brown, author of techno-thrillers frequently compared to those of Tom clancy and Michael Crichton, made publishing headlines with his fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code (2003); it rose to the top of most major newspaper's best-seller lists and, within a year and a half, had more than 7.5 million copies in print. As National Security Institute Managing Director Don Ulsch notes, "what Clancy has written so convincingly about the CIA and the FBI, Brown has [done so] masterfully for the National Security Agency" (Ulsch). Dan Brown was born on June 22, 1964, in Exeter, New Hampshire, to a math professor and a musician specializing in sacred music. He was educated... |
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| Essay on Charles Brockden Brown Biography |
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| Charles Brockden Brown Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A novelist, journalist, and editor, Charles Brockden Brown is considered the first professional American novelist. Of his seven published novels, four are still considered significant: Wieland (1798), a gothic tale of murder and insanity; Ormond (1799), a gothically inspired tale of seduction; Arthur Mervyn (1799), a picaresque bildungsroman; and Edgar Huntly (1799), a nightmarish portrait of a sleepwalker. Brown is clearly a precursor of Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of whom admired his ability to portray the private anguish of an obsessed individual, and the darker side of the human psyche in general. Among more modern practitioners of the gothic, who describe... |
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| Essay on Charles Brockden Brown Biography » |
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| Essay on Louis Bromfield Biography |
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| Louis Bromfield Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Louis Bromfield, who lived in Paris from 1925-38, wrote 19 novels, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Early Autumn (1926), his third novel. He also wrote five collections of short stories, a dozen Hollywood screenplays, three plays, and, from Malabar Farm in Pleasant Valley, Ohio, 10 nonfiction works, seven of them about subsistence agriculture and soil conservation. Because he based his novels on his beliefs in Jeffersonian democracy and in an agriculturally based America, he failed to adapt the innovative techniques and urban themes advocated by his modernist contemporaries; this choice, as well as Bromfield's widespread popularity and his steadfast refusal to mix politics in his writing, caused his fall... |
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| Essay on Louis Bromfield Biography » |
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| Essay on Richard (Gary) Brautigan Biography |
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| Richard (Gary) Brautigan Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Two decades after his suicide, Richard Brautigan is viewed by most mainstream critics and readers as a luminary of the hippie movement in its Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock heydays, and many detractors think he had little to say in his later novels and was eclipsed by the more apparent talents of the Beat novelists Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Brautigan is remembered today chiefly for his avant-garde Trout Fishing In America (1967), a novel that revolutionized postmodern fiction and may be compared today to works of his contemporary, Ken Kesey, and viewed as the precursor to such younger writers as Tom Robbins. Richard Brautigan was born on January 20, 1935, in Tacoma, Washington... |
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| Essay on Richard (Gary) Brautigan Biography » |
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| Essay on Marion Zimmer Bradley Biography |
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| Marion Zimmer Bradley Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Marion Zimmer Bradley--who wrote under the pseudonym "blah," among others--was a prolific shortstory writer, literary critic, editor, and founder of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine. Her science fiction and fantasy novels ensured her status as one of the most prominent women writers in these genres, along with Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler. She was among the first to scrutinize gender roles and human relationships, most famously in The Mists Of Avalon, published in 1984 and winner of a Locus Award that same year. Bradley is best known for her Darkover novels, which chronicle the history of the Darkover planet over several centuries. Marion Zimmer Bradley was born... |
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| Essay on Marion Zimmer Bradley Biography » |
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| Essay on Ray Bradbury Biography |
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| Ray Bradbury Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Along with Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, recipient of the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Science Fiction Writers of American Grand Master Award, is considered one of the major science fiction writers of the 20th century. His already fine reputation in those genres has evolved and now includes mainstream readers and critics (Mogen, 10). Although he is best known as a writer of short stories, he has produced six novels, including Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). Discerning critics point out that in both novels Bradbury is an astute social commentator and a prober into psychological and human issues. In the words of Bradbury scholar George M. Slusser... |
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| Essay on Ray Bradbury Biography » |
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| Essay on T. C. Boyle Biography |
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| T. C. Boyle Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A finalist for the 2003 National Book Award for Drop City, his most recent novel, T. C. Boyle has written nine novels and six short-story collections. Many critics consider him to be a postmodern 20th-century Charles Dickens who draws attention through his satirically conceived novels and stories to a variety of social ills. Although he is often grouped with John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, he seems more readable because of the sheer rollicking enthusiasm encoded in his hyperbolic, parodic, and often fantastic tales. T. C. Boyle was born on December 2, 1948, in Peekskill, New York, to Thomas John Boyle, a school bus driver, and Rosemary Post McDonald Boyle, a secretary, both of whom died of complications... |
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| Essay on T. C. Boyle Biography » |
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| Essay on Kay Boyle Biography |
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| Kay Boyle Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A member of the expatriate group that made Paris its literary and literal home during the 1920s and 1930s, Kay Boyle lived in France for nearly two decades; during that time she wrote the many short stories and novels for which she is most renowned. In addition to volumes of poetry and essays, children's books, and numerous articles, Boyle spent six decades producing 18 novels and novellas and scores of "New Yorker stories," a genre she is credited with inventing. Her novels chronicle the woes of expatriate artists, usually women, and she concentrates on the destructiveness of war, especially that caused by Nazism. Boyle's experimental style, including stream of consciousness and interior monologue... |
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| Essay on Paul Frederick Bowles Biography |
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| Paul Frederick Bowles Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Paul Bowles, a 20th-century Renaissance man, has had a significant impact on American literature. Although he was a composer, a translator, a painter, and a poet, he is best known as a novelist and short-story writer who imagined and created bleak and disintegrating modern worlds. He wrote four critically acclaimed novels, the best known of which is The Sheltering Sky (1949). Bowles is often compared with French existentialist writers Andre Gide and Albert Camus, and with the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. With a career spanning most of the 20th century, Bowles received the 1950 National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and, in 1980... |
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| Essay on Paul Frederick Bowles Biography » |
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| Essay on Jane Auer Bowles Biography |
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| Jane Auer Bowles Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Jane Bowles exerted a strong influence on modernist fiction. The author of the play In the Summer House (1953) and short stories posthumously collected as Plain Pleasures (1966), Bowles was interested in morality, sexuality, and, increasingly, psychological realism. Two Serious Ladies (1943), her only novel, like the work of other modernists from Edith Wharton to Ernest Hemingway, left gaps in the text for readers to fill. Although Two Serious Ladies did not sell well in the United States, it was popular in England; the playwright Alan Sillitoe called it a "landmark in 20th century American literature." (Jane Bowles Obituary) Jane Auer Bowles was born on February 22, 1917, in New York City... |
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| Essay on Jane Auer Bowles Biography » |
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| Essay on Arna Wendell Bontemps Biography |
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| Arna Wendell Bontemps Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Arna Bontemps was a highly influential member of the Harlem Literary Renaissance and, later, director of the Afro-American program at Yale University. It is, however, as a novelist and short-story writer that he is best remembered. Of his three novels, the best known is Black Thunder (1936). He was born on October 13, 1902, in Alexandria, Louisiana, to Paul Bismark Bontemps, a lay minister in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and Marie Carolina Pembrooke Bontemps, a former schoolteacher. Both parents were Creoles. Bontemps was educated at Pacific Union College, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923 and at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree in 1943... |
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| Essay on Arna Wendell Bontemps Biography » |
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| Essay on Lawrence Block Biography |
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| Lawrence Block Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Lawrence Block, named the "Grand Master of the murder mystery" by the Mystery Writers of America in 1994, has been writing for almost 50 years. His three wellknown and popular fictional detectives--Evan Tanner, Bernie Rhodenbarr, and Matthew Scudder--are hardboiled enough to be compared to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and Block himself is often compared to detective fiction writers Ross MacDonald and John D. MacDonald. Lawrence Block was born on June 24, 1938, in Buffalo, New York, to Arthur Jerome Block and Lenore Harriet Nathan Block. He married Loretta Ann Kallett in 1960; the marriage ended in 1973, and he married Lynne Wood in 1983... |
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| Essay on Lawrence Block Biography » |
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| Essay on William Peter Blatty Biography |
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| William Peter Blatty Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. The Exorcist, a horror novel published in 1971, made a tremendous impact on the popular imagination, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year. This novel by William Peter Blatty has been compared with Thomas Tryon's The Other and Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby in the way they use the horror fiction genre. To cite critic Gary Hoppenstand's words, their horror fiction uses "grotesque violations" of respected "American institutions and traditions" (Hoppenstand, 36). Blatty was awarded a Silver Medal, California Literature Medal Award for the novel, and a Golden Globe award for the best screenplay for the film, The Exorcist. William Peter Blatty was born on... |
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| Essay on William Peter Blatty Biography » |
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| Essay on Earl Derr Biggers Biography |
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| Earl Derr Biggers Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Earl Derr Biggers created Charlie Chan, a Chinese-American detective who appeared in eight of Biggers's novels and in nearly 50 Hollywood films. (A total of six different actors played the role of Chan.) The first novel to feature Charlie Chan, The House Without A Key, was published in 1925, and the final book in this series, Keeper of the Keys, appeared in 1932. Earl Derr Biggers was born on August 26, 1884, in Warren, Ohio, to Robert Biggers and Emma Derr Biggers. He attended Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1907. Biggers was supposedly fired as drama critic of the Boston Traveller because he unhesitatingly "roasted" bad plays at Boston theaters. Although he had almost... |
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| Essay on Earl Derr Biggers Biography » |
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| Essay on Doris Betts Biography |
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| Doris Betts Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Doris Betts is the prize-winning author of six novels and three shortstory collections. Despite her southern settings, Betts has resisted the label "southern woman writer," and is similarly resistant to being labeled a Catholic writer. Her fiction usually focuses on working-class characters with high school educations; Betts believes that the "writer's duty is to put into words what it is like to be a human being in this world, even for the inarticulate" (quoted in Evans, x). Her 1981 novel, Heading West, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and Souls Raised from the Dead (1994), winner of the Southern Book Award, was named one of the 20 best books of 1994 by the New York Times. Her most recent novel... |
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| Essay on Wendell (Erdman) Berry Biography |
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| Wendell (Erdman) Berry Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Although he made his name as an award-winning essayist and poet, Wendell Berry has amazed readers with his talent and versatility; he has written five novels and three collections of short stories, and he has won the Friends of American Writers Award for his novel The Memory of Old Jack (1974). All his writing evokes love and respect for the land, for Berry believes that individuals must live in harmony with nature and with their community if society is to survive. As scholar Andrew A. Angyal notes, Berry's writings celebrate the best traditions of self-sufficient agricultural communities "before it is lost forever" (Angyal, ix). A contemporary of poet Gary Snyder and Stanford classmate... |
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| Essay on Wendell (Erdman) Berry Biography » |
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| Essay on Gina Berriault Biography |
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| Gina Berriault Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Gina Berriault enjoyed a career that spanned several decades. She was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, both for her short-story collection, Women in Their Beds. Berriault was also the author of four critically acclaimed novels. Typically set in the San Francisco area, these novels won praise for her precise and lyrical depictions of characters in crisis, perhaps most memorably women set adrift from their traditionally male-anchored worlds. Gina Berriault was born Arline Shandling on January 1, 1926, in Long Beach, California. After graduating from high school, Berriault married and later divorced John V. Berriault, a musician, and taught creative writing... |
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| Essay on Gina Berriault Biography » |
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| Essay on Thomas Louis Berger Biography |
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| Thomas Louis Berger Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Thomas Berger, according to scholar and critic Brooks Landon, is America's "most undercelebrated writer," and a novelist and playwright of "stunning achievements" (Landon, "A Secret Too Good to Keep"). Best known for his magnum opus of the old West, Little Big Man (1964), Berger was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 novel, The Feud. Some of Berger's protagonists reappear in more than one novel, and he is adept at depicting spies, seduction, feuds, survival, the future, murders, and detectives. According to Landon, Berger's characters are "almost never in control" over their situations, and "consistently find themselves outmaneuvered, outsmarted, insulted, and imposed upon"... |
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| Essay on Thomas Louis Berger Biography » |
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| Essay on Sandra Benitez Biography |
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| Sandra Benitez Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Sandra Benitez, author of four critically acclaimed novels set in Mexico and El Salvador, owes much of her appeal to her simple yet elegant style, although she writes about complicated human beings with stunning insight. Readers have been captivated by Benitez's depictions of both the working class and the wealthy, and by her ability to evoke the places and events that shape their lives against complex social, political, and geographic backdrops. She is adept, too, at interjecting cultural ambiance through judiciously selected Spanish phrases. Benitez's numerous awards include a 1999 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Bitter Grounds. Sandra Benitez was born on March 26, 1941... |
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| Essay on Sandra Benitez Biography » |
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| Essay on Saul Bellow Biography |
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| Saul Bellow Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature, Saul Bellow continues to fascinate readers with his absurd, alienated, and marginal characters who nonetheless manage to affirm the values of dignity, courage, and the irrepressible human spirit. As scholar Ellen Pifer concludes, Bellow's heroes, "riddled" as they are "with contrary emotions," tend to "waver uneasily between alternate commitments--to action, fellowship and worldly self-assertion on the one hand and to stillness, contemplation and solitude on the other" (Pifer, 1). Since his initial appearance in the canon of American literature along with Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, and others, Bellow has been widely admired for his stylistic diversity... |
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| Essay on Saul Bellow Biography » |
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| Essay on Edward Bellamy Biography |
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| Edward Bellamy Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. After Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), for the rest of the century it remained second in sales only to Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-seller Uncle Tom's Cabin; selling nearly a million copies in 10 years, the novel was also popular with socialist groups in European and Asian countries. Bellamy, whose ancestors were all ministers, was a social reformer who had no enemies. The socialist utopia he proposed in Looking Backward was palatable to his audiences because of the imaginative fictional technique he used. In contrast, Equality (1897), the sequel to Looking Backward, contained far less creativity and was more didactic. Edward Bellamy was born on March 26, 1850... |
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| Essay on Edward Bellamy Biography » |
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| Essay on Madison Smartt Bell Biography |
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| Madison Smartt Bell Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Novelist and short-story writer Madison Smartt Bell has published 12 novels and two short-story collections. By the time he was 35, he was considered by numerous critics to be a prodigy who wrote about social outcasts and used a technique that blended traditional narrative structure with postmodern minimalism. Madison Smartt Bell was born on August 1, 1957, in rural Williamson County, near Nashville, Tennessee, to Henry Denmark Bell, a lawyer and later a circuit judge, and Georgia Allen Wigginston, an equestrian who gave riding lessons, ran a summer camp, and managed the family's 96-acre farm. Bell was educated at Princeton University, earning his bachelor's degree (1979) in English... |
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| Essay on Madison Smartt Bell Biography » |
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| Essay on Louis Begley Biography |
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| Louis Begley Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Louis Begley has published seven novels, several of which have been nominated for literary prizes: Wartime Lies (1991) received the PEN/Ernest Hemingway First Fiction Award and was nominated for a National Book Award and a National Book Critics' Circle Award. Like his famous predecessors, Edith Wharton and Louis Auchincloss, Begley writes mostly about the elite community of very wealthy New Yorkers. Louis Begley was born Ludwik Begleiter, on October 6, 1933, in Stryj, Poland, to Edward David Begleiter, a physician, and Frances Hauser Begleiter. He immigrated to the United States with his family in 1948 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1953. Begley was educated at Harvard University... |
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| Essay on Louis Begley Biography » |
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| Essay on Ann Beattie Biography |
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| Ann Beattie Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Ann Beattie has been repeatedly called the chronicler of her generation, those who came of age in the late 1960s. Author of six novels and six short-story collections to date, Beattie, a lightning rod for the professional critics, has been both faulted and hailed as a minimalist who is the equal of Raymond Carver and Donald Barthelme. Some critics complain that her work lacks a moral center and that her usually white, apathetic characters lack intensity and humanity. Despite the critics, Beattie has a loyal following of readers who identify with her presentation of fragile identities and failed relationships in a culturally changing world. Ann Beattie was born on September 8, 1947, in Washington, D.C.... |
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| Essay on Charles (Morley) Baxter Biography |
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| Charles (Morley) Baxter Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Charles Baxter, whom critics have hailed as an heir to such Midwest novelists as Willa Cather, has published four short-story collections and four critically acclaimed novels, First Light (1987), Shadow Play (1993), The Feast of Love (2000), and Saul and Patsy (2003), as well as the novella in the collection entitled Believers (1997). Speaking of the "blandness" of the midwestern landscape and the "reticence of its inhabitants," Baxter said that he "would put Midwestern writers such as Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Willa Cather against those of almost any area--except maybe the South--for the depth of their writing. If you write about the Midwest, you have to dig in order... |
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| Essay on Charles (Morley) Baxter Biography » |
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| Essay on Richard (Carl) Bausch Biography |
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| Richard (Carl) Bausch Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Richard Bausch is the author of nine novels, two of which were nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, and two short-story collections. He writes of American families experiencing problems with alcohol and aging, dashed hopes and desperation, turmoil and tragedy. He writes from neither an autobiographical nor a regional perspective; unlike a number of novelists identified with a specific place, Bausch focuses on story and character. His novels include Take Me Back (1981) and Violence (1992). Richard Bausch, one of twin boys, was born on April 18, 1945, at Fort Benning, Georgia, to Robert Carl Bausch and Helen Simmons Bausch. He and his twin Robert grew up in the Washington, D.C.... |
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| Essay on Richard (Carl) Bausch Biography » |
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| Essay on Rick Bass Biography |
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| Rick Bass Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A short-story, novella, and nature writer who passionately combines art and activism, Rick Bass published his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be, in 1998. A petroleum geologist by training, Bass began writing stories and tales that earned him the PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation in 1988. He has produced 17 books in 18 years, including two volumes of novellas, two collections of short stories and both fiction and nonfiction tales and essays. He has also published scores of articles, the majority of them about Montana, his adopted home. Born on March 7, 1958, in Fort Worth, Texas, Rick Bass is the son of C. R. Bass, an oil geologist, and Mary Lucy Robson Bass, a schoolteacher. Although reared in Texas... |
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| Essay on Donald Barthelme Biography |
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| Donald Barthelme Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Donald Barthelme, one of the foremost postmodernist writers of the 20th century, made his name primarily as the author of more than 100 short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker before their publication in many collections of short fiction. He won both the PEN/Faulkner Award (1982) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Sixty Stories (1981). He also wrote novels, including Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975), and won a National Book Award for The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine; or, The Hithering Thithering Djinn (1971), a book for children. Central to Barthelme's short and long fiction is the almost despairing sense of the shabby, desiccated... |
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| Essay on Donald Barthelme Biography » |
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| Essay on John Barth Biography |
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| John Barth Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. John Barth, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and theorist, first appeared on the literary scene with the 1956 publication of The Floating Opera, followed two years later by The End of the Road. His fascination with the paradoxes, inadequacies, and comic possibilities of language is apparent in his innovative approach to writing fiction. Barth, considered the major voice of postmodern fiction, uses the language of myth and allegory, of history and comedy, to convey his own reality--a reality that fluctuates according to the way he uses his words. The irrationality of the world is demonstrated in his longer and increasingly postmodern novels--The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles Goat-Boy... |
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| Essay on John Barth Biography » |
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| Essay on Andrea Barrett Biography |
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| Andrea Barrett Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Andrea Barrett is admired for the way that she unites art and science. Winner of the 1996 National Book Award for Ship Fever, and Other Stories, and a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her collection Servants of the Map: Stories (2002), Barrett has also written five critically well-received novels, including The Voyage Of The Narwhal (1998). Although her four earlier novels are concerned with the complexity and fragility of family relationships, it is, interestingly, the last--The Voyage of the Narwhal--that successfully reflects Barrett's scientific background. Andrea Barrett was born on November 16, 1964, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Walter Barrett and Jacquelyn Knifong. She was educated at Union College... |
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| Essay on Andrea Barrett Biography » |
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| Essay on Djuna Barnes Biography |
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| Djuna Barnes Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Djuna Barnes was one of many expatriate writers during the interwar years who crossed sexual, national, and artistic boundaries. Along with Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, H. D., and others, she lived in Paris in the 1920s. There she wrote two experimental novels, Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936), her best-known work, a stylistically intriguing account of a sexually mysterious woman and a transvestite, and an indictment of puritanical values. T. S. Eliot wrote the introduction to the first edition, and the novel found support among James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. In the last few decades Barnes's novels, poems, and plays have attracted increasing scholarly attention, particularly... |
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| Essay on Djuna Barnes Biography » |
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| Essay on Russell Banks Biography |
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| Russell Banks Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Praised for his honest and insightful portrayals of complex working-class characters, usually native New Englanders, Russell Banks is a multitalented novelist, short-fiction writer, and poet who has won awards for the tales in his five story collections. Of special note are his American Book Award-winning The Book of Jamaica (1980), and The Continental Drift (1985) and Cloudsplitter (1998), both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Banks's characters endure drug addiction, spousal abuse, alcoholism, bad father-son relationships, infidelity, racism, hopelessness, and the exigencies of working-class life as he sees it. Although his early work was experimental, since 1990 Banks's gritty and realistic... |
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| Essay on Russell Banks Biography » |
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| Essay on Toni Cade Bambara Biography |
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| Toni Cade Bambara Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Best known as a talented writer of short fiction, Toni Cade Bambara is also the author of The Salt Eaters (1980), a complex novel with multiple voices that won the American Book Award. In addition to the short-story collections Gorilla My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977), Bambara, a professor and community activist, wrote essays about civil rights and the women's movement that are collected in The Black Woman (1970), and a collection of folktales entitled Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971). Bambara was born on March 25, 1939, in New York City, to Helen Cade. She earned a bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1959 and a master's degree from the City College of New York... |
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| Essay on Toni Cade Bambara Biography » |
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| Essay on James (Arthur) Baldwin Biography |
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| James (Arthur) Baldwin Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. One of the most significant and influential 20th-century American authors, James Baldwin gained renown as an essayist, a novelist, a story writer, a playwright, as well as a civil rights activist and a tireless public speaker. The grandson of a slave, Baldwin, who lived on the racial, sexual, and cultural margins of the United States, "literally wrote his way into the very center of his nation's cultural life and into the heart of his country's conscience" (Nelson, 6). He published six novels. Go Tell It On The Mountain (1953), his first, now classic, novel, is a fictionalized autobiographical account of a young man growing up black in white-dominated America... |
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| Essay on James (Arthur) Baldwin Biography » |
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| Essay on Nicholson Baker Biography |
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| Nicholson Baker Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Nicholson Baker, with five novels to his credit, is concerned with stretching the limits of postmodernism. He is particularly known for his obsession with the detail of everyday living. He elevates the meaning of this trivia to a philosophical level, and, in addition, scrutinizes and describes the details of sexual experience. In the words of novelist David Shields, Baker "is a kind of literary Statue of Liberty--give him our wretched refuse and he'll turn it into poetry" (Shields, 8). Always writing to mixed reviews, Baker has been called vulgar and pornographic by some critics, and artistically erotic by others. Nicholson Baker was born on January 7, 1957, in Rochester, New York... |
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| Essay on Nicholson Baker Biography » |
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| Essay on Peter Bacho Biography |
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| Peter Bacho Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Peter Bacho won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for his debut novel, Cebu (1991). He followed Cebu with the short-story collections entitled Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories (1997) and Boxing in Black and White (1999). All his works, including his second novel, Nelson's Run (2002), focus on contemporary Filipino Americans. Like the protagonists in both his novels, Peter Bacho is a Filipino American, the son of immigrant parents from Cebu in the Philippines. Born in 1950, Bacho graduated summa cum laude from Seattle University in 1971, and earned a law degree from the University of Washington in 1976. He worked as an attorney and a journalist before becoming a professor of law... |
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| Essay on Peter Bacho Biography » |
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| Essay on Mary Hunter Austin Biography |
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| Mary Hunter Austin Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Scholars in the 21st century have reawakened interest in Mary Hunter Austin after a half century of obscurity. Austin, known especially as a feminist and nature writer, wrote nine novels and a novella, and numerous stories, sketches, poetry, and plays. She is particularly remembered as an author who loved the land and respected Native Americans, especially those in the land of "little rain," parts of California and Nevada, home to the Northern Paiute, Shoshone, Interior Chumash, and Yokut peoples. The author of several feminist novels, Austin is remembered particularly for the avant garde novel, A Woman Of Genius (1912). Friend and colleague of numerous writers of her time, including Willa Cather... |
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| Essay on Paul Auster Biography |
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| Paul Auster Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Paul Auster is one of the most respected experimental novelists to emerge in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He moved into the critical limelight with The City of Glass (1985), the first novel in his New York Trilogy; the other two novels, Ghosts and The Locked Room, appeared in 1986 and 1987. In 1987 he also published In the Country of Last Things, an unusual science fiction novel that focuses on the here and now rather than the future. To date, Auster has published 11 novels, including The Music Of Chance, nominated for a PEN Faulkner award. Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey, to Samuel Auster and Queenie Bogat Auster; he grew up in Newark and was educated... |
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| Essay on Louis Auchincloss Biography |
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| Louis Auchincloss Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Known throughout his prolific writing career (nearly 30 novels and over 100 short stories) as an heir to Edith Wharton and Henry James, Auchincloss has also taken as his subject the privileged men and women of New York society. He is particularly noted for his fine craftsmanship and psychologically penetrating insights into male and female characters who face personal dilemmas and crises as do we all. Auchincloss's characters, however, often harbor a sense of inferiority or insecurity, despite their apparent wealth and privilege. Under close Auchinclossian scrutiny are the conflicts between marriage and sex, particularly those generated by the demands of a socially elite but closed society... |
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| Essay on Gertrude Atherton Biography |
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| Gertrude Atherton Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Known primarily as a novelist, Gertrude Atherton published 34 novels and seven short fiction collections, as well as books and magazine articles on American history, culture, and nature in the late 19th century. The majority of her novels feature unconventional western women heroes who chafe at the social constrictions inhibiting their freedom. Often compared to novels of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and Bret Harte, Atherton's California novels, including The Californians (1898), Ancestors (1907), and Perch of the Devil (1914), examine the issues surrounding romance and matrimony. Of particular interest are The Doomswoman (1893) and A Daughter of the Vine (1899), where, for instance, the hero... |
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| Essay on Isaac Asimov Biography |
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| Isaac Asimov Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Isaac Asimov is considered to be one of the most significant science fiction writers of the 20th century, along with Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. Such novels as The Gods Themselves (1972) and Foundation's Edge (1982), and the stories "Nightfall" and "The Bicentennial Man" have received numerous honors. His most important contribution--defining "robotics" (a word he coined) and writing about robots--began with I, Robot in 1950. There Asimov decreed that robots could never harm humans, must obey humans in almost all ways, and must safeguard themselves whenever possible. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics influenced both written and filmed science fiction of the 20th century... |
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| Essay on Harriette Simpson Arnow Biography |
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| Harriette Simpson Arnow Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Kentucky-born Harriette Simpson Arnow is a writer whose work stands on its own: Readers can understood and appreciate her novels without any recourse to background information. As scholar and critic Wilton Eckley points out, however, the pleasure of reading her novels is enhanced by knowing about Arnow's kinship with both the beauty and the hardship of Appalachia, the mountains and the Cumberland River. Although she has been called a regionalist and a local-color writer because she portrays her part of Kentucky with such detail, the majority of critics and reviewers understand her universal appeal in the past and now. When she was alive, her books sold well and earned admiring reviews... |
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| Essay on Tina McElroy Ansa Biography |
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| Tina McElroy Ansa Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Tina McElroy Ansa takes for her subject the lives of middle- and upper-middle class African Americans in the post-1960s Civil Rights movement era. She is the author of Baby of the Family (1989), Ugly Ways (1993), The Hand I Fan With (1996), and You Know Better (2002). All four novels are both popular and critical successes, and the first three are award winners. Tina McElroy Ansa was born on November 18, 1949, in Macon, Georgia, to Walter J. McElroy, a businessman, and Nellie Lee McElroy, a teacher's assistant. She was educated at Spelman College, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1971. After nearly eight years as a journalist with the Atlanta Constitution and the Charlotte Observer... |
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| Essay on Maya Angelou Biography |
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| Maya Angelou Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Maya Angelou became a national figure after President Bill Clinton asked her to read her poetry at his inaugural in 1993. She had been known and admired widely, however, among readers for the past two decades. Angelou had already published five autobiographical works that charted her life from age three to her mid-30s. The first of these, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), became an immediate best-seller and was made into a CBS made-for-television movie. As scholars Lyman B. Hagen and Ernece B. Kelly and others point out, however, Angelou's works, particularly Caged Bird, are more properly called "autobiographical novels" (Hagen, 55) rather than autobiographies. Angelou, whose writing has earned her... |
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| Essay on Sherwood Anderson Biography |
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| Sherwood Anderson Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Sherwood Anderson is best remembered for Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a short-story cycle that had an enormous influence on individual writers in particular and on American literary history in general. In 1925, literary critic H. L. Mencken praised Anderson as a significant, original novelist. He wrote seven novels and two fictionalized autobiographies, A Story-Teller's Story (1924) and Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926) as well as Memoirs (1942). Anderson is still admired for his sympathetic portrayals of the isolated, "grotesque" (a word he used frequently), and the lonely, sexually repressed characters of his fictional Midwest, a place changing rapidly in an increasingly technological... |
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| Essay on Sherwood Anderson Biography » |
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| Essay on Rudolfo A. Anaya Biography |
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| Rudolfo A. Anaya Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. An award-winning author known for his groundbreaking first novel, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Rudolfo Anaya has succeeded in illuminating the Chicano heritage through his novels, stories, poetry, essays, and plays. He derives his ideas and inspiration from the culture and folklore of the American Southwest. By blending fantasy and realism, and by interweaving the magic of Mexican myth, tradition, and symbol, Anaya creates characters who ultimately discover their identities and understand themselves to be individuals within communities. Anaya's novels are also about faith and the loss of faith, reflecting his own youthful spiritual crises, and they employ bilingualism to illuminate...
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| Essay on Rudolfo A. Anaya Biography » |
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| Essay on Julia Alvarez Biography |
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| Julia Alvarez Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Julia Alvarez, novelist and poet, has managed in little over a decade to attract a "crossover" (or mainstream) audience while chronicling the experience of the Latina in the United States. She has already achieved critical approval and attracted a large number of non-Hispanic readers. In this she is similar to Isabel Allende, Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, Ana Castillo, Esmeralda Santiago, and the American Book Award Winner, Sandra Benitez. Alvarez remains best known for How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), winner of the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Book Award, and for In The Time Of The Butterflies, a historical novel and 1995 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award... |
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| Essay on Julia Alvarez Biography » |
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| Essay on Dorothy E. Allison Biography |
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| Dorothy E. Allison Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Dorothy Allison has made a name for herself by writing about the impoverished white southerners among whom she was reared. After attracting favorable attention with Trash (1988), her short-story collection, and The Women Who Hate Me (1991, a poetry collection aimed particularly at the gay and lesbian community, Allison published the novel, Bastard Out Of Carolina (1992), a finalist for a National Book Award. Since then she has been compared with William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Harper Lee and has written Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature (1994), an acclaimed essay collection; Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995), a brief memoir; and the ambitious novel Cavedweller... |
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| Essay on Dorothy E. Allison Biography » |
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| Essay on Paula Gunn Allen Biography |
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| Paula Gunn Allen Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. A scholar and critic respected across the literary community, Paula Gunn Allen is also well known as a poet and editor of Native American anthologies. She is, additionally, a writer heralded among Native people for her recording of Native stories and as a spokesperson for both gays and lesbians in contemporary society. Her influential novel, The Woman Who Owned The Shadows (1983), validates the lesbianism of the young Native American woman who dominates the book. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1939, to E. Lee Francis, of Lebanese origin, and Ethel Francis, of Laguna Pueblo, Sioux, and Scots origin, Allen (then known as Paula Marie Francis) was reared in Cubero, New Mexico... |
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| Essay on Paula Gunn Allen Biography » |
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| Essay on Nelson Algren Biography |
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| Nelson Algren Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Nelson Algren adopted as his subject the impoverished and the down-and-out of the Chicago slums. Although he wrote of other locales as well, his National Book Award-winning novel The Man With The Golden Arm (1949), as well as Somebody in Boots (1935), Never Come Morning (1942), and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956) have firmly established him as the chronicler of drug addicts, swindlers, drifters, prostitutes, derelicts, and of the emotionally and physically handicapped. In the words of French writer Simone de Beauvoir, with whom he had a long and well-chronicled love affair, Algren was the "Division Street Dostoyevsky," the realistic chronicler of the gritty Chicago streets where many of his... |
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| Essay on Nelson Algren Biography » |
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| Essay on Horatio Alger Biography |
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| Horatio Alger Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Horatio Alger's more than 100 juvenile books told and retold the rags-to-riches stories that appealed so strongly to the American reader in the 19th century; they are responsible for his reputation as the best-known writer of boys stories in the field of American fiction. The term "Horatio Alger hero" has long been a metaphor for the ordinary citizen who, by dint of effort and will, achieves success in the United States, the land of opportunity and the home of the American Dream. Alger also wrote two adult novels, The New Schoolma'am; or, A Summer in North Sparta (1877) and The Disagreeable Woman, A Social Mystery (1895), as well as an unpublished novel-length manuscript discovered after his death... |
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| Essay on Horatio Alger Biography » |
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| Essay on Sherman Alexie Biography |
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| Sherman Alexie Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Sherman Alexie, winner of numerous poetry fellowships and awards, has garnered high praise for his fictional treatment of contemporary Native American reservation life. Equally renowned for his short stories and novels, Alexie also wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals, the award-winning film based on his 1993 story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. His novel Reservation Blues won an American Book Award in 1996. Alexie, born on October 7, 1966, to Sherman Joseph and Lillian Agnes (Cox) Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian reared on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. He writes from his awareness of the poverty, alcoholism, and despondency suffered... |
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| Essay on Sherman Alexie Biography » |
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| Essay on Thomas Bailey Aldrich Biography |
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| Thomas Bailey Aldrich Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Thomas Bailey Aldrich was a poet, editor, and novelist of the late 19th century, who is today best remembered for a short story, "Marjorie Daw" (1873), and a novel, The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), based on his own childhood in New Hampshire. Aldrich's sympathetic portrayals of youth invite comparison to those of such writers as Louisa May Alcott. Aldrich began his career as a poet, and by age 16 he had submitted and published poetry in the Portsmouth Journal. Aldrich had hoped to attend Harvard, but his family could not afford to send him to college, so he moved to New York City where an uncle offered him work as a clerk. Influenced by the New York literary bohemians, by age 19 he published... |
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| Essay on Louisa May Alcott Biography |
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| Louisa May Alcott Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, and reared during the "American Renaissance," an era identified with such influential authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and changed forever by such significant women as Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott, who worked for women's rights. Although Alcott published Little Women, an instant classic, in 1868-69, and subsequently wrote a variety of popular stories and novels for both adults and children, she appeals to contemporary readers because of the feminist context--often subversive in nature--in which we now read her work. Alcott's "Little Women" books (eight in all) were highly... |
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| Essay on James Rufus Agee Biography |
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| James Rufus Agee Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. In his relatively short life James Agee, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Death In The Family (1957) and the short novel The Morning Watch (1951), demonstrated remarkable talent as a novelist, poet, journalist, film critic, and screenwriter. Critics have recently shown renewed interest in his film essays and his screenplays, which include The African Queen, written with director John Huston, The Night of the Hunter, and adaptations of two Stephen Crane stories. Agee remains best known, however, for A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his nonfictional but literary documentation of the grinding poverty of Alabama tenant families during the Great Depression... |
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| Essay on Renata Adler Biography |
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| Renata Adler Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. As an outspoken critic of the hypocrisy, posturing, and pretension that for her characterize many postmodern writers, Renata Adler--journalist, essayist, and short-story writer--turned to novel writing herself. Speedboat (1976), her first novel, was a runner-up for the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and winner of the 1976 Ernest Hemingway Prize for best first novel, although some critics argue over whether Speedboat's apparently arbitrary structure and plot, and its randomly organized grouping of stories, does in fact constitute a novel. Together with her second novel, the critically acclaimed Pitch Dark (1983), Adler has staked out a position along the edge of the bleak... |
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| Essay on Renata Adler Biography » |
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| Essay on Henry (Brooks) Adams Biography |
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| Henry (Brooks) Adams Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Henry Brooks Adams was born into one of the best-connected of American families. His maternal grandfather was a successful businessman; his paternal great-grandfather was John Adams (second president of the United States); his paternal grandfather was John Quincy Adams (sixth president); and his father, Charles Francis Adams, was a diplomat. After graduating from Harvard University and making the requisite tour of Europe, Henry Adams worked successively as secretary to his father, freelance journalist, and assistant professor of medieval history at Harvard. In 1872 he married Marian Hooper, daughter of a wealthy Boston surgeon, and, five years later, he decided on a writing career... |
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| Essay on Henry (Brooks) Adams Biography » |
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| Essay on Alice Adams Biography |
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| Alice Adams Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Alice Adams, one of those rare writers admired equally for her achievements in the novel and the short story, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975 for her novel Families and Survivors (1974). Her novel Superior Women (1984) was a best-seller. In 1982, after her work appeared for the 12th consecutive year in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Adams joined Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike as winners of awards for continuing achievement. Her novels have earned praise from reviewers and such fellow writers as Anne Tyler and Updike and have been alternate selections in both the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild. Love, in all its forms, is Adams's subject. Her female characters must... |
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| Essay on Alice Adams Biography » |
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| Essay on Kathy Acker Biography |
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| Kathy Acker Biography Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on American Writers. Kathy Acker, an iconic figure in the punk movement of the 1970s, became the female enfant terrible of the postmodern writing community, shocking readers and critics alike with her radically unconventional style and sexually explicit subject matter. Substituting chaos, immorality, and pornography for order, convention, and romantic love, Acker's writings appear intentionally fragmented and disordered, but they are in fact a demonstration of society's view of women as sexual objects. Consequently, she is both critically acclaimed for her talent and virtuosity and condemned for the radical nature of her themes. Acker, a native New Yorker, was born in 1948 to affluent German-Jewish parents... |
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